Free Chill by Elizabeth Bear Page A

gulped air and pushed a braid angrily aside again. “Well, I looked. And there were chambers I couldn’t enter. Someone might have survived, but if they did, I did not find them. I couldn’t think of anything to do other than come to Engine and present myself.”
    “Ariane and Arianrhod,” he said with brutal flatness, “killed everyone in Rule. And Ariane consumed them.”
    She moved against his hand to break his grip, sidestepping left. He allowed her to go. She walked away, the precision of her step leaving perfect bootprints behind. In profile, a tilted, incongruous nose almost vanished into her face. She said, “So you are looking for Arianrhod. And where is Ariane?”
    “My daughters have avenged the family.”
    He’d meant to say it with pride, as if to convince himself of what he felt. What came out was toneless, shriveled—a flat declaration of uncompromising truth.
    It turned Chelsea’s head to look back at him. Her mouth worked. “Your daughters.”
    “Perceval,” he said. “And Rien. Perceval is Captain now. It’s how we survived the nova.”
    “I knew something must have occurred,” she said. “Captain. In truth?”
    He could not speak. He nodded, willing his face still.
    And as he had known she would, Chelsea asked, “And Rien? Surely not the same Rien who served in Rule—”
    “The same.”
    “Oh, Benedick. She was not there when—”
    “No.” Whose voice was that? Surely not his own, ironed flat and colorless. “She translated. She brought the angels together, and saved the world.” He managed a sidelong glance. She stared at him still and the color had gone from her cheeks. “Tristen was witness.”
    She was a Conn. She didn’t ask a question when the answer was implied. Instead, she said, “And Ariane?”
    “She and Perceval dueled. And Perceval consumed her.”
    He didn’t imagine the upward curl of her lip, the faint smile she chose to hang on an otherwise impassive mask. “Well. Good for Perceval.”
    “Captain,” the angel said. “Will you not speak with me?”
    Perceval firmed her jaw. She felt skin stretch, the pull of muscle against bone, the way her teeth pressed each other. Every motion of her body seemed new and sharp, as if she moved against the dull edge of a knife.
    It was not fair to hate the angel.
    But hate him she did. Everything he represented, everything he had done to her, and everything he had become. Hated him so her palms slicked and her tongue dried, and she had to resort to her colony’s neurochemical controls to keep her hands from shaking with adrenaline.
    The past would not stay steady in her mind. That was new. Her colony should remember for her, as perfectly detailed as always. But now her memories seemed a fugue, as if objective reality had somehow slipped askew. Therewere people inside her, and they pressed at her, demanding. As if they had some right to her mind, her time.
    Or as if she were remembering events as perceived through more than one set of synapses. Events, in some cases, that predated her birth by hundreds of years. Events that had occurred a world away from her experience. Events for which she had been present—but now she saw them as if through other eyes. She remembered the neutral heft and temperature of an unblade inertialess in her hand, the salt-metal splash of blood. The memory was not her own, nor was the rush of satisfaction it carried with it. The nausea, though, and the recollected shock of agony that set her wing-stubs stretching against her scars—that was her own, and she held on to it like salvation.
    “That’s you.”
    The angel was just there, in Perceval’s peripheral vision, a dark shape in dark clothing, silver hair stark against the darkened bridge beyond. He seemed taller, slimmer than before, with eyes as black as the Enemy. He reached out long, curved fingers and rested them not on Perceval’s shoulder, but on the bulkhead nearby. She bit her lip and did not move away.
    The angel said, “It is