Meticulously, he began to affect repairs.
In the morning, when at last they lay down and pretended sleep across the space between couches, Rien touched the feather to her lips and breathed across it.
It did not smell like Perceval.
She tucked it under the pillow, and left it there.
18 his harness and his promises
Because these wings are no longer
wings to fly
But merely vans to beat the air
Rien must have slept eventually, for when Perceval awakened she was facedown in her pillow, snoring slightly. Perceval, shaking herself free of Pinion and swinging her legs over the lip of the couch, looked at her fondly. Did anyone sleep the way people were shown to sleep in dramas, tidily and composed?
Perceval would have bent down and kissed Rien on the forehead, but her kiss would not have meant what Rien needed it to, and she did not wish to cause more grief than needful. Instead, she knuckled sleep from her eyes, dressed as silently as possible, and padded barefoot into the hall.
She'd lost weight, which was only to be expected. She curled her toes on the flooring, a patterned carpet runner, and could see bones and tendons and indigo veins sliding beneath the blue-tinged skin. As if in answer to the thought, her stomach grumbled.
Well, that was a direction, at least. With Pinion fanning on her shoulders, she rose on tiptoe and rotated slowly, breathing deeply, searching the scent of breakfast—or dinner, as the case might be. Overall, she suspected it was probably closer to dinnertime.
And she did smell something sweet and grainy, like hot cereal, or baking bread. She followed that aroma, not back through the entrance hall but in the opposite direction, deeper into her father's house. The corridor was chill; she barely felt it. She had been cold so much of late that she wondered if she would ever notice cold again.
But that scent, and the scent of coffee, drew her on. She wondered if she had somehow slept the clock 'round, but her internals assured her that it was only a little after sixteen hundred. Voices hummed on the air, one of them unmistakably Benedick's baritone, but the words were indistinguishable in echoes. They led her in the same direction as the smell of coffee.
Eventually she came through a door that looked decorative but was most likely an air seal waiting to fall, and she paused.
She had expected a dining room, dishes laid on the sideboards or brought by bustling servants. Instead, what she found was a sunny small room, the walls clear yellow and the trim cheerful orange. There was a circular table big enough for six, and Benedick and Tristen—his chin shaven and his hair trimmed halfway down his back—sat at the ten and two positions, their backs to the window, bowls and cups before them.
Perceval saw a different view from this side of the house: apple trees, their roots humped under the snow, and what must be an airy glade when this side of the world was not frozen. A red bird no bigger than Perceval's hand flitted from branch to branch, whistling. The flare must be over: the light seemed normal, and other senses told her the background radiation was falling off.
"Rien says the suns are dying," Perceval said. She pulled out a chair and sat, a little forward to make room for Pinion behind her.
"Her father's daughter," Tristen said. Benedick shook his head, faintly smiling, so Perceval wasn't certain if the dig was directed at her or at him—or even if it was meant to be a dig at all.
Perceval cleared her throat. "What's for breakfast?" Tristen rose and fetched a cup from the cabinet. The coffee was on the table in a carafe, and Perceval poured her own and doctored it with soy milk and honey. Benedick said only, "How does Rien know?" As she was drinking her coffee and explaining about Hero Ng (Benedick and Tristen shared a significant glance when Perceval told them about Mallory), a bowl of oatmeal appeared at her elbow. The necessities of honey and cinnamon and salt and more soy milk occupied her hands for a moment. She had barely even registered the presence of the resurrectee servant who left it there.
She finished the story and the oatmeal at close to the same time, and pushed the bowl away. "It sounds as if Hero Ng has been expecting this for a long time. Since the end of the moving times. These suns have always been unstable."
"Then why bring the world here?" Tristen asked. No doubt a rhetorical question, and none looked more shocked than he when it was answered.
"Because at the time there was no choice." The voice was deep, gravelly, harsh as if with over- or underuse. Benedick was on his feet before the speaker finished, a pistol in one hand and a dagger in the other. Tristen remained seated, seemingly languid, the drape of his hand and wrist across the tablecloth unchanged. But Perceval could feel the electricity in him. That air of repose was no more reliable than a hunting cat's.
As for herself, she set her coffee down—it was laced with cardamom, and she harbored intentions of finishing every mouthful—and slowly pushed her chair out to stand. She furled Pinion tight when she turned, so as not to interfere with her father's or her uncle's line of sight or line of fire.
And when she turned, she saw—a man. A small man, all out of proportion with the voice. His blond hair hung lank on either side of a long, lined face, and his nose looked like it had been repeatedly broken. Perceval blinked. She wasn't sure she'd ever seen someone so fascinatingly ugly.
He wore a dove-gray morning coat and no shirt, and his feet were as bare as Perceval's and far hornier. "I am Samael," he said, "the Angel of Biosystems. And I am afraid the ghost of Hero Ng is quite correct. It is really time we were going."
"Not to seem rude," Benedick said, without lowering his weapon, "but amicable relations would be easier established should you reveal how you came to enter my house."
Samael paused, pale locks threaded through both gnarled hands as he pushed his hair behind his ears, earrings and finger-rings glinting. "Like this," he said, and vanished like a switched-off light.
Involuntarily, Benedick stepped forward. And Tristen stepped to the side, flanking him. Perceval craned her neck; surely there was meant to be some sort of a special effect when a person disappeared, a flash of light or a pop of air. Not a simple, crisp vanishment.
And then Samael reappeared, over by the cabinets this time and wearing a green damask greatcoat and a pair of sooty wings that—unlike Pinion—trailed off through the wall.
"You're a projection," Perceval said.
Samael clicked his tongue. "Close." He opened a cabinet door and shut it again, ran ticking fingernails over the cherrywood finish, and then picked up a coffee cup and held it out, handle-first, toward Tristen. "If I may presume?"
Tristen took it cautiously, a long lean and reach. He filled it with coffee and handed it back.
"Thank you," Samael said, and sipped.
And Benedick looked sidelong at Tristen and holstered his weapons.
"Thank you," Samael said. "You only would have shot holes in your paneling, anyway. Technically, I am a distributed machine intelligence, in specific the entity charged with maintaining the habitability of the vessel you call the world. That habitability is in serious danger, and along with it, your lives. What you see before you"— with a flick of his hand, he forestalled Benedick, whatever might have been Benedick's question—"is in fact a sort of hologram, an avatar animated through the refraction of light. I, Samael, am all around you."
A quick caress stroked Perceval's cheek, though she saw nothing. From Tristen's flinch, he felt the same, and though Benedick remained unmoved, his eyes narrowed.