Grail - By Elizabeth Bear Page 0,30

him unwounded. And from everything she had heard, she might not have wanted to know him unwounded.

The most he’d confessed on the subject was “It was beneficial to me, in the long run, to spend some time alone with my sins,” pronounced with a wry sideways twist of his lips that could have been mistaken for a smile.

Time was the great closer of wounds, so even a maiming of the soul could heal over and quit seeping if you lived long enough. Although (thinking of Rien) Perceval wasn’t sure if the amputated bits ever grew back again, or even truly stopped aching. Perhaps they just became more impervious to careless blows.

She wasn’t sure she wanted them to harden off. Letting go of that loss meant letting go of Rien, and Perceval found the prospect more painful than recollecting the amputation of her wings. Better to lose a piece of your body than a piece of your soul, she thought.

And now there was Caitlin—a loss still too raw to do more than whisper past. If she looked at it too long, too directly, her eyes stung and her throat closed, and then she was no use to anyone.

She watched from her chair while Samael and Tristen conferred, heads bent, speaking via vibration in low tones she could easily have analyzed, if she chose. But it was impolite to eavesdrop, and if anyone had earned her trust, Tristen had. He wanted to surprise her? Well and good.

When he came back, the folded paper basket rested in his hand. Samael waited inside the door—a homunculus whose outline was dictated by the eddies of organic detritus caught up in his energy field. There was something doll-like about him, although the mosaic detail of the shape described by bits of straw and petal and translucent insect wing was quite fine. He had managed to survive Nova’s assimilation of the angels in this diminished form. Nova and Perceval allowed his unique existence to persist so long as he claimed no additional resources—beyond waste and scrap, if waste and scrap could be said to exist in the closed ecosystem of the Jacob’s Ladder—and so long as he comported himself as an ally.

Perceval watched Nova’s avatar rez in beside Samael’s—politeness when dealing with non-Engineer humans, but when confronted with another angel, a bit of rank-pulling. By resolving herself for him, she said in essence, you are not angel enough to meet me on my own terms.

That Samael did not protest, and had never protested, was either a sign of submission or of incalculable patience. Given her knowledge of his past, of his prior and more powerful self, Perceval was inclined to believe the latter.

When he got close enough, Tristen shoved the picnic meal into Perceval’s arms and grinned wolfishly. “Come on,” he said. “We’re going outside.”

In under ten minutes, Perceval was walking with him across the hull of the world, toting the paper basket (now wrapped in a thermal shield), while she herself was still wrapped in her suit of armor, well wrought against the depredations of the Enemy. Nova had access to detailed sensory and proprioceptive information from her hull. Those data were far more nuanced than anything Perceval and Tristen could glean from simply stomping heavy-booted across the surface of the world, trusting electromagnets to bind them where they ought stand, and trusting their own honed skills and trained reflexes to slip them through the very fingers of the Enemy should their grip be somehow broken. But the incident with Leviathan in which the Jacob’s Ladder had nearly been destroyed had taught them that Nova’s senses were not unimpeachable, and eyes-on inspection was a valuable protocol.

And now there was the question of how the mercenaries had penetrated their defenses. And of what they had wanted with the Bible. And of what had become of Charity.

Still, what they did was useful work, and it kept her mind off lightspeed lag and grief and her worries regarding what they would do should the denizens of Grail turn them away.

Usually it was carried out by junior Engineers. Perceval’s armor was also richly bedecked with sensors, and it and her eyes showed her a few of those on the hull this hour, quartering slowly across their assigned patrols, gazes trained a few feet in front of their boot steps. Their armor was marked by color. The russet and orange of Engine said they had reported to Perceval’s mother, Caitlin Conn, Chief Engineer. Each wore rank sigils on their shoulders and