out a closed hand. She raised hers under his; gently he laid something on her palm. She closed her fingers over it.
When she uncurled them, she saw what she had expected—and never before, honestly, expected to hold. The sunburst of Engine, with a real, dark, flawed ruby—mined on Earth—set in hammered gold.
“Oh,” she said.
“I hope,” he said, “you do not wear it long. But if you do—this may not be a favor I have conferred upon you.”
“I’ve fought a war beside you before, First Officer.” Jordan closed her hand around the badge. “I would not hesitate to so serve again.”
10
this fragment
Beyond the limit of their bond, are these,
For Arthur bound them not to singleness.
Brave hearts and clean! and yet—God guide them—young.
—ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON, “Merlin and Vivien”
Samael the Angel huddled beside a stand of carnivorous mimosa at the edge of a derelict commuter pit, something small and fragile in his hands. Overhead, flocks of green birds wheeled, clamoring, in vaulted spaces against a metal sky. He crouched, cupping it close to his bosom and under his chin. The protectiveness was symbolic; his corporeal body, such as it was, was delineated by swirls of leaf scraps and flower petals, an organic mosaic like an old-Earth parade float—although those had been a festival of conspicuous consumption, and he was … salvage.
On so many fronts.
And so was the thing in his hands—or the energy fields, demarcated by shimmering bands of pollen and pine needles, that passed for his hands. It was tiny and hotter than blood—a naked, bony, pulsing thing dotted with pinfeathers, the head no more than a gaping beak and tight-squinched eyes.
Deep inside it, an ancient and tidily engineered inducer virus pulsed as well, a blue glow imbued with energy, intellect, memory, and will. Samael could feel it, alive and cognizant, as alien as the stone-souled silicon space creature from which Cynric Conn the Sorceress had birthed it.
Samael—Angel of poisons, mutagens, life support, evolution—was not entirely sure what it was thinking in there. But the parrotlet chick he cradled was part of a larger organism as well, and so precious not just for what it was—a life—but also a link to the larger chain of being: the great hierarchy of creation from God to Captain to Angel to Crew, and so on down the line.
Samael felt the Conn woman coming long before her shadow fell across him. Her white robes swept around him; the sapphire in her nostril glittered green. She laid elegant fingers on his shoulder—in his shoulder, for his leaf-litter self indented to her touch and the particles of his being bent around her—and leaned down.
“One of ours,” Cynric said, delighted. Her long face was transformed by a smile. “They’re still flourishing.”
“You wrought well,” he allowed. He shifted the birdlet to one hand and plucked a berry from his breast to feed it, crushing the fruit between fingers that barely existed. Stained blue now, the bird-mouth still gaped greedily. “She fell from the nest. Or perhaps the parents rejected her.”
“Can I see?”
Cynric’s hands were long and blue-white, and far more corporeal than Samael’s own without being any less ethereal. She cupped the birdlet and bent her head to it, leaning close until she took its tiny head into her mouth. It stilled in the dark, and Samael tilted his head to watch.
There was no decisive crunch this time. “Healthy,” she said, having run her assessments and lowered her hands. “Back up into the nest with you, adorable.”
Flocks of green parrotlets, no longer from beak to tail tip than the length of her hand from palm heel to fingertip, mobbed her screaming as she stood up tall and reached spindle arms into the thorny, sensitive branches of the mimosa. The tree swept feathery leaves aside, obedient to the will of the Conn who had engineered its forebears, revealing three stick-and-feather nests full to brimming with huddled, pulsing baby birds.
She leaned in close, sniffing, seemingly impervious to the way the angry flock wheeled and dove and chattered, some going so far as to strike her with doubled talons or pull the strands of her hair. Deliberate, considering, she settled finally on the highest nest and reached within. Samael had never quite had human senses, but he’d lived all his life around women and men, both Exalt and Mean, and so it was no great stretch to imagine her fingers brushing between fragile, prickly, sticky-moist bodies to make space for the lost nestling, and the way her other hand deftly slid it back