He races through the city at night, down streets and alleys all but deserted, encountering only rare clusters of celebrants, listless and confused, abandoned by the presence of the mhuruk-a. Always forward, guided by the light tipped spire of the Whelemat complex. He chases its image against the cliffs and the night sky like a beacon. When he arrives, he skirts the steel and glass structures of the new buildings, plunging through decorative gardens, along concrete walkways, scaling chain link fences until he reaches the old industrial park. There’s little light here, and he slows his pace. He’s surrounded by the raw bones of New Holyoke here, the resurrected past. Cold, sterile stone and utilitarian roads grated from building to building, rutted and potholed. Mountains of gray slag and gravel, pits delved into the rock with walls that plunge off at right angles into pools of black and brackish water.

Searching, scanning, peering. He approaches the flat outer wall of the abandoned main mining station. It towers above him, half the height of the cliffs, like a medieval turret. Except there’s a door at the base, light aluminum that reflects the moon, that squawks on unoiled hinges as it’s pushed by the breeze.

He goes inside, where it’s completely dark. Dark and silent and crowded with menace, with flanged steel and great cogwheels, whirling blades and crunching rollers spiked with stone rending teeth. He can sense the weight and density of the massive ore extracting machines hanging above him, idle and hungry.

He’s been here before, this virtual space at least, chasing hostile shed through an industrial night.

This time, at least, he remembered to bring a flashlight.

Ray advances quickly now, down a broad corridor between the curve of dusted and dingy hoppers, great holding tanks for fresh ore trundled along conveyer belts that emerge from a darkness at the far end and branch off at sharp angles, then slope upward to hang from the ceiling like spiderwebs. At the mouth of the mine shaft, he stops briefly to collect his gun.

Echoes of language, garbled chants, rise up to him, faint like the buzz of insect wings against his ears.

And screams. Sharp, bitter, suddenly truncated.

In fear, they would bid us do great evil.

He plunges in, down the shaft worn flat and even by a thousand miners’ feet tramping back and forth to work, to labor, to the glorious future of their colonial home. He ducks his head beneath the suspended track of the conveyer belt, beneath shadows that leap out at him from the odd contours of the walls, specters raised by the wild and skittering beam of his flashlight. The odor of damp stone and sweat and past explosives linger in the air. And beneath that is something else, coppery, viscous, gagging.

As he draws near, he can hear their chants and the stomp and slap of their feet above the sound of his own footfalls and his own panting. He has to pause at a junction of tunnels, craning his neck, casting for echoes. Right turn, and he’s off again, always wending downward. A hundred meters, another junction, down again, until he seems to feel the entire weight of the planet hanging over his head.

The tunnel ceases to descend, runs straight and narrow for a short space, and at the end is light, bright and yellow, and the stone carved doorway into a chamber. Ray charges toward it, pursued by screams that hang fresh and murderous in the thick, subterranean air.

He races to the light.

To the light, and through, it seems, some wormhole in space and time. Into the past. Into the desert. Back to the place where it all began.

Ba’dai.

He scuds to a halt on the lip of a chamber lit by guttering torches, shaped into a circle, vaulted like a dome. The lectern of bedrock, the ranks of worshippers kneeling; the full score of them slapping their hands against the floor in staccato rhythm, counterpoint to the chant; the bound victims laid out in troughs next to the great stone ring. The narrow trenches descending from trough to ring, stained dark with blood.

Just like Ba’dai.

Only this time, the sacrifices are orphans, children of the Trust.

This time, they shriek and struggle as they are laid beneath the knife.

This time, the ones wielding the blades have held their sacrifices down, and grinning with savagery, plunged their trowels, cast their offerings, then called for fresh meat. The blood is everywhere, and the eviscerated bodies, used and cast aside, are a charnel heap of limbs and crimson cloth, empty, glistening eyes and wide, rictus-frozen mouths.

And this time, Ray is alone.

He grips the butt of his pistol, but there aren’t enough bullets in the world to cleanse this chamber of its horror. And not nearly enough for the Dag Maoudi gathered here. All the aged and ancient ones who have served the Whistons for decades, who have cleaved to the old ways and grown weary of subservience, are here. Fulfilling their destiny.

Too many.

From the lectern, Amah cries the chant to summon the shed, and to peel back the binding force of the ring.

Sha-oa con kiri ton! Mhuruk-a tala miri-ya! Kiri-ya!

She is ecstatic with sacrifice, transcendent with the shedding of blood, her head thrown back and arms cast wide, palms splayed above her head. The Dag Maoudi answer with voice and slap. The knives flash, rise and fall, as efficient as a grain thresher. And distant, like the rumble of far-off thunder, the shed called by blood answer. Not one, but legions without number.

A legion who rise, and as they ascend, think nothing about communion. Only about blood.

And between lectern and ring is Emma, mhuruk-a and vessel, glassy, rigid, silent.

Beside her, inside the ring, the shimmering, quicksilver swirls, the fundamental essence of the shed accelerate to a dizzying pace. The swirl becomes a haze of opalescence, and in the haze, another universe opens up like a blank and staring eye, a vortex of impenetrable stellar emptiness that gusts with alien winds and ravaging physical forces beyond knowledge, from which emerges a hand, an arm–teeth and mouth and throat shouting with a ferocity of lust that shivers the stone walls.

In this maelstrom of chant and roar, resounding echo and emerging chaos, Ray weighs options that do not exist, not when each passing moment is a cry and a flash of knives. There are no adequate plans for situations like this; no choices but bad ones.

He just acts, aims and fires, curses as he squeezes the trigger again and again. Because he’s ruining everything, because with the first blast and recoil, the Dag Maoudi start to move and scatter, and it takes too many shots to drop his targets as they flee. And because responsibility has bound him as cruelly and efficiently as a Solomonic ring to kill the child murderers first, all seven of them, though there are willing hands waiting to take their place. A dozen willing hands. But them first, if only to stop the slaughter for a little while, while he works out something better.

He watches Amah, matriarch, root of the Dag Maoudi on New Holyoke, duck behind the lectern, unassailable.

He counts down the shots in his magazine until only two shells remain, and then he stops.

Most of him, the sane part, could go on killing them forever. But he has no other choice, because the shed continue to rise.

In the howling and confusion, the scrambling away and rush for cover by the Dag Maoudi, the screams of the bound and terrorized children who remain, Ray sprints across the open floor of the chamber, over the troughs slick with blood, past the corpses of Trust children. To Emma, who he has promised to protect. Emma who has known what the Dag Maoudi intended all along. Emma who carries within her the seed of his child and the glowering presence of the mhuruk-a.

Emma, who has lied to him, manipulated him, betrayed him from the start.

Amah, exultant, growls through the din. “You are too late, Mr. Marlowe. Already, the host of the mhuruk-a rise. A host beyond number who will lay waste to all our enemies, who will return to us the glory that was stolen from us. This is might of the Dag Maoudi! This is the power we bore in ancient times, when those who spoke of us trembled for fear of the mhuruk-a! We are revived! We are restored!”

As she speaks, the first shed leaps free of the ring, thunders at the heavens, shaking its mighty fists. It laughs, then springs into the air, concusses its being against solid rock, vanishes.

In its wake is an image planted like a bomb inside Ray’s skull. A thought, instruction, mission bearing the weight of inevitability: a frozen tableau of Townshend Wright, Director of Whelemat, plotting betrayal, with flames leaping from his naked chest, terror stamped on his face, the odor of his immolating flesh thick in the air.

The visceral impact is stunning. For an instant, it stops him from breathing, quiets the raging chaos of his thoughts.

In that silence, there is another sensation, frail, whispered, urgent. Just a voice inside his head, counterpoint to so much impending violence.

Commune with me.

Madness. What did he think he was going to do? Just grab Emma by the hand and run off into the night, to some illusion of safety? Did he believe that would change anything?

Assess and evaluate, Jack said, and if it is a threat, eliminate the principals.

He’s understood nothing, not until this moment, not until confronted with the limitless might of an inexhaustible supply of shed. The wrath and fury of the Dag Maoudi; the willingness to destroy everything to create a world they would own. A world born in blood, ruled by terror. And it was only the beginning.

This was the future Frederick Whiston had foreseen; the vision he had destroyed Paraclete to prevent. Frederick was the only one who had truly understood.

Only Frederick.

Ray wants to close his eyes. He wants to curl himself into a ball in a dark place and hide until the end of time.

Because Frederick had also known what must be done. With is last breath, with a heart full of twisted love and grieving and hatred, he had attempted to show Ray as well. The Dag Maoudi could not be allowed to possess the shed forever. Whatever the cost.

They could not be permitted to possess the child who could control the shed without blood. They would all of human space into a hell of their own devising.

So he lifts his hand a final time and directs the gun not at Amah, not at the Dag Maoudi, but presses the barrel against Emma’s forehead.

He looks into her eyes, still longing for her even now. What choice do I have? It has to stop here.

Into his mind, the mhuruk-a speaks, pleading and urgent. Commune with me.

Another shed ascends from the ring, its ululations cavernous, bounding. Primed to lay waste to EED, Colonel Ritchie, the wicked hands of the FSA. Except for the shed no one moves. They’re all transfixed by the gun, estimating his sanity.

“Stop it,” Ray shouts. “Stop it now.”

Amah lifts herself up from behind the lectern, exposing herself. She is seething, her dark eyes narrowed to slits and the muscles of her jaws bulging so that the blackened scars of her tattoos pulsate like living things. “What would you do? Kill the mother; kill the child. It accomplishes nothing.”

“It keeps them out of your hands. It keeps you from controlling them, just like you controlled me.”

But Amah dismisses him with a disgusted jerk of her head. “As long as the Dag Maoudi endure, there will be vessels, there will be the mhuruk-a, and there will be hope. You would kill her, this woman you love, who would bear the child of your loins, the child of promise, and all you would gain is time. And still, the mhuruk-a will serve us.”

Another shed flung from the ring, greedy for destruction.

Again, the mhuruk-a, flooding his thoughts. You were made to commune, as she was made to commune.

“You can’t go on killing in secret anymore. I’ve shown the people of Blackheath Grange the truth about the Dao. They’ve seen the mhuruk-a and finally understood what you’ve been doing all these years.” At least he hopes so. He hopes they grasped the meaning of the shed. “They believe, and believing, they won’t be cattle for you any longer.”

“Then they, too, will be destroyed. And we will begin again. The Dag Maoudi endure; we bear with us the old ways, and they sustain us. As the Whistons have sustained us, as our own people did before, we always survive. And where we go, there are always men greedy for the touch and the power of the mhuruk-a.”

“Not this way,” Ray spits back. “Not with blood and sacrifice and murdered children. I won’t allow it.”

Amah barks at him, laughing. “Not this way, indeed. No longer are we bound to one mhuruk-a. One who has served with diligence, but whose strength wanes. Now they are a multitude. Now there will be more vessels, and none will stand before us. And one day, there will be another child.”

Ray tugs the pistol’s hammer back with his thumb. “Not in your lifetime.”

She stares at him, weighs his intent, frowns. “Do not do this, Mr. Marlowe. Do not steal from us this child.”

“I won’t allow you to kill any more people. Any more children, just so you can rule the world.”

“Is that what you have been told?” Amah says quietly. “That all we desire is power? The Dag Maoudi have remembered and tended to the mhuruk-a when all others forgot, learning from them. We have kept the old ways while the rest of mankind chased after science and technology. Humanity has given itself over to cowardice and weakness, hiding behind its machines, its devices. Turning its back on what it has always meant to be human. We have not possessed out universe, but merely inhabited it. This is what the mhuruk-i would teach us if we allow them.”

Faint, almost beyond sense, the shed inside Emma whispers. Commune and know.

Amah frowns at him, at his stupidity. “The future we have offered you is a treasure beyond estimation. This is the purpose of your child. To make us rise. To open the gates that bar us from true communion with the mhuruk-i. We who have been faithful, the Dag Maoudi. We will rise, and we will be remade into a true humanity, a new breed of man who walk with the mhuruk-i as equals. We will be as gods over an old humanity, usurpers of the name, whose time has passed.”

He could kill her now, this shriveled and hideous ape. “Enough of my friends have already died for your vision of a new humanity.”

But Amah sighs as though overtaken by a great weariness. “In ancient times, there were men of wonder. Men of might and renown. Daed Faala, who could calm the seas with a brush of his arm, was such a man. Ruach Shin. Your King Solomon. Mohammed, Moses, Jesus. We call them wise, wondrous, workers of miracles. Into their hands was given the power of creation, the power to bend to their will the very structures of reality. And it was Daed Faala who bound the mhuruk-a in the Stone. It was Solomon who placed his shed in this ring. Why, I ask you?”

Why?

She doesn’t wait for his answer. “Because they saw that we would wane, that men are wicked. That our knowledge would falter, and our blood would grow weak. And as we failed, we would not retain our place as brothers and sisters of the mhuruk-i, but would become their servants and slaves, lesser beings. There are no more mighty men among us. Instead, we must rely on tools and ritual, rites of blood to do what great men once did with will alone. And what they did, what they have always done, is to harness the power of the mhuruk-i and learn from them. Learn to become more than what we have been.

“There is no joy in the shedding of blood, and we know that the things we have done are terrible. But they must be done. We cannot lose the touch and wisdom of the mhuruk-a. It is our last hope of preserving what humanity has been, and what it was meant to become. Not to plunge ourselves into technology, into blindness, into the rituals of science, the mere manipulation of matter, but to truly inherit our birthright among the sentient universe. To craft an indelible niche for humanity. The Dag Maoudi would do this, but we must have a place free from the control of men where we can gather strength, where we can build fortresses against our own decline. Where we can bind the spirits and learn from them, and learning, recapture the greatness that was lost. It is the child of your union, the vessel and the one, who will accomplish this. A child that would be perfect, the progenitor of a new race, and a new humanity.

“We would create mighty men once again, able to wield the power of the mhuruk-i. Glorious and free and godlike. It is the destiny of our species, Mr. Marlowe, and to achieve it, we would crush all who stand in our way. For all that we have done, all the innocents struck down, we are not monsters. We would preserve all of mankind.”

This is what Emma has believed, Ray realizes, what she’s believed her whole life, over all the years in which Amah has prepared her to be the vessel. Endure this, because the alternative is failure and suffering, the decline of the entire species. But through you, we can produce offspring with the power to bind up the essential stuff of the cosmos, defend humanity against decline and destruction.

Emma had spent her entire life believing she was sacrificing herself to save the world.

And if he let her live, let their child be born, she would go on believing it as the Dag Maoudi lied to her, twisted what she perceived, carved out a kingdom for themselves through manipulation and violence and exploitation of the mhuruk-a.

She believed she was saving them all. It was the only way she could make sense of the Dao.

Understanding descends on him like a weight, a stone as heavy as the universe itself. Emma, sweet Emma, what have they done to you?

Emma lifts her eyes to him, as though sensing his thoughts. No, not Emma, but the mhuruk-a, the shed. It drowns him in her gaze, searches and embraces and penetrates.

“Commune with me,” it says. “Commune and know.”

And not just the mhuruk-a, it seems to him, but somehow Emma, too. Emma and the shed entwined, so closely knit as to be the same being, both hungry, both wanting. Both pleading with him to commune at this moment.

The shed from the ring ascend more quickly now. He can see them in his peripheral vision, sense their emergence, their leaping and shouting and vanishing to chores of destruction. A score in the last minute, frenzied with purpose and frenzied to sate their lust for blood. They cast the glimpses of their victims into the ether like visions. Officers from the Port Authority, civic leaders, Whelemat board members, social luminaries. Anyone who would oppose the will of the Dag Maoudi.

Thomas Malcolm. Ray catches this image with the striking clarity of a hammer blow. Thomas Malcolm, crushed and mangled, his building imploded. For passing secrets, the shed seems to say.

Focus. Into Emma’s gaze, burying himself.

“What? What do you want me to know?”

“Come and see.” Come and see.

He hears Jack Holcomb, Emma already knows, Ray. She is the vessel. She has already been changed. She was genetically constructed to emulate neural patterns with which and through which the shed could communicate. Just like you.

Emma, who believes she is saving the world, who has shown always, forever, pure and blazing outrage at those who would betray her, who has willingly accepted the burden of the Dao. Not because she has been deceived, but because she is the vessel. She can commune with the shed. She knows them and is known by them in ways he can only imagine.

And from her depth of knowledge, she asks him to trust her, the only other human being in the universe in a position to know the truth. Come and see.

IftheshedaretrueIftheywishusharmIftheywouldsaveordamnIftheylieIftheywouldbetheallinalltheancientofdaysthekeepersofpromiseIftheywillcommuneandinstructIftheyriseIftheyriseIftheyriseandifwemightrisewiththemComeandseeComeandseeifwewillriseRayRisewewillrisewewillri

“Believe,” the shed whispers. “There is nothing to fear. Believe, and you will rise.”

He wavers for a time that seems infinite, beyond measurement, staring into the vast and placid depths of Emma’s gaze, open to him beneath the relentless barrel of his gun. He hangs between ring and shed, Amah’s dour and capable threat, the re-gathering community of the Dag Maoudi in the chamber, the wailing of children undefended–everything for which he is responsible. Everything she is asking him to release.

To commune.

To embrace his own being, his own revelation.

To rise.

At the last, to trust Emma, and with her to rise.

Assess and evaluate, Jack said.

He says, “I am and your are, and we are one.”

He speaks, and he falls into her.

***

He falls, and as he plunges into a world of darkness, he also rises. A universe of stars without space, unformed, absent of distance, all of creation jammed into a pinpoint that is dense with potential. And yet immense in scope. It is everything and nothing, matter and void. It is all things and all places and outside of time. Beyond perception and understanding, the raw material of gods.

And he is formless consciousness, unbound being. He is everywhere at once, possessing all that has been made inside himself, and still he expands.

Where he expands, there are others like him, feathery, tickling awareness that brushes against his filigreed fringes of amorphous self. Where they touch him, he is known and they are known to him. Their being whispers tales of age beyond reckoning, of years measured in the radioactive decay of isotopes the way a tree counts the seasons in its rings. Their roots plunge deep into the fabric of space, into a bottomless well of dark matter and liquid, plastic chaos.

And he is aware that these consciousnesses are not shed. They are not anything known to him or the exploration and history of man. They name them themselves in signs and symbols that express sprawling concepts of being, culture, definition, and he grasps it all and holds them in his mind. He embraces them, and they trickle, laughing, through his hands like water from spring. Their number is beyond counting, but he also touches them one and all, individually, each one unique and particulated. He accepts that they are, and he is not overwhelmed.

He glides into a nursery of stars, the superheated depths of compressing matter, of rending gravity, and it smells to him of musk and strawberries. He watches the gathering of cosmic dust and thermonuclear detonation, and there is joy in the binding and the forming and the creation. There is joy in the frigid loneliness of the gulf between stars flung from the cradle. There is joy in being, like a song woven into the dance of element and energy. A song that is purpose. A song that rises.

He knows things no man has ever known. He clutches an awareness of the basic engines of creation, of the manner for knitting quarks and electrons, molecules and atoms. Anything he can envision, he can perform. Anything he chooses, he can do. Anything he seeks, he can find. Knowledge expands within him, and there is no want, no lack, no worry. The bones of the universe are there to be laid bare at his command. But he also feels its harmony. He pulses with its song, and what he conceives is not just his will, but his will as reflected within a consciousness of the will of everything else.

He is, and they are, and all of them are one. They are not alone, and they are cognizant of one another, always in harmony, one grand and encompassing will and being.

It’s all here. Everything that ever was, is and will be. If he chose, he could page through each discrete instant of human history, experience it from every possible perspective, within the perception of every mind, all at once. He could share the glory of the foundation of timeless Rome. He could scale the heights of Kilimajaro with the wandering Australopithecus africanus. He could count the hordes of the Khans as they swept across the Mongol plains. Or taste the nectar of primordial soup at the instant life emerged. But he doesn’t need to, because he knows it all. He becomes all. Everything is fluid, changeable, unmoored, unlinear. And if he wanted, he could cast it all down. He could blot it from existence. Destroy it, but it would still be, a memory with the substance of reality. Both truths existing together, equally true, equally eternal.

A state of pure potentiality, this is the reality. This is what it is to rise.

The height is dizzying, beyond him, a twisting spiral of vertigo.

So the shed comes to him, speaks directly to his being. Not the shed as he has known it before, in the form of a man or even in its own body of tentacle and flipper and cool, black eyes, but as itself, as consciousness separated from biology. Just as he is.

You see as we see, know as we know, are as we are. In communion, all things are possible. In communion, you may perceive with the mind of God.

Yes.

You see what a frail creature is man? Bound to the substance of flesh, unwilling to rise, isolated within husks. Each one a universe unto himself, without cognizance of one another, each entity alone, alien, without reference and communication.

Yes.

This is true freedom. From want, from lack, from isolation. This is the community of being where all things may be known and all things exist. Whatever you imagine can be. Here, all things are just, all things are possible, all things are immortal. This is where we would lead your kind to be. It is the inheritance reserved for your seed.

To rise. To become gods and control the universe. Not just to manipulate, but to create. It’s right there in front of him, unlimited possibility, and what he has touched is only the fringes of the truth. Imperfect knowledge. His child, Emma’s child, and all who came after would know perfectly.

This is what Jack Holcomb perceived in the shed. The next logical step in human evolution.

It’s also what the Dag Maoudi have foreseen. A future for which they would shatter everyone and everything around them. A glory they would possess at any cost.

And Frederick Whiston, he saw it as well, but only in terms of Dag Maoudi exploitation.

All of it, imperfect knowledge. Symbols without context.

And Emma? All she wanted was to rise.

Ray, he would rise with her. He and Emma and their child of promise together.

I am and you are, and we are one.

Turning their backs on everything mankind has built to become something new and limitless, something in harmony with the consciousness of the shed. Rejecting the inheritance of mud and violence and contempt, of exploitation. Joining the celestial chorus. Perfect being, unfettered.

In his vastness, he reaches out. He extends himself to the limit of his perceptual horizon, and finds multiple billion sentient beings, all of them singing in harmony with the universe, all of them reaching out to him with knowledge and wisdom, all of them with wonders to share. Deeper, farther, stretching to the extremes of his awareness, and he senses her at last. She is joy, and pleasure, glorious. He approaches her, circling, and she’s not alone. Inside her is the burgeoning consciousness of their child, a being of pure light, growing, pulsating, living. And the thrumming of life emanating from the child is the rhythm and the song of the universe itself.

He reaches for her, then, and knows her. Everything that she is, has ever been. All that she’s seen and thought and experienced. Ray holds her essence inside himself like the remembered scent of the first flowers of spring.

He touches her, and she touches him in turn, and they are one.

Touching her, he chooses.

“One,” he says. “We are one.”

And choosing, he finds others of the shed, not as he has perceived them, but as they are, rank upon rank, stunning in their thousands and tens of thousands. Conscious, singing, the hidden soul of a distant world, cast adrift, pursued by disaster and chaos. Weary they came to an infant planet, the bones of matter, the essence of earth. Their thoughts became dreams of men, strange and wild. Their flesh slumbers in the deep, in chasms of night, in frozen seas. Through cold space and strange eons they came; when man was young they were already ancient, and aged and filled with grim loneliness. And from their bodies sprang life, and they became entities of consciousness, form without substance.

Ghosts of themselves.

And men dreamed of them. Some believed and rose. Some believed, and believing, fashioned visions of power.

All that time, the shed bid them only to rise.

We seek only habitation; a space in which to live free. In harmony with mankind.

Some believed and made themselves vessels of light, mighty men capable of fashioning great things. Others believed, but rejected harmony and learned to bind the spirits of the shed in labyrinths of stone and ring.

Rest and habitation after long travail. Coexistence. And in return, we will teach you all the secrets of the universe so that you want for nothing.

In return.

In return for coexistence.

And Ray remembers what Emma said to him, that night in the garden. She comes. And when she’s here, she’s everything. Nothing of me remains, only mhuruk-a. And I am her vessel. It’s what I was born to become, what all the Whiston daughters have been bred to become–summoners and channels for the spirit of the place. Spirit made flesh. Because it’s the flesh that makes us human, animals, beings bound to land and cycle and rhythm. Rutting like pigs makes us human, and it’s the only way the mhuruk-a can touch them. The two made one, spirit made flesh. They fuck the vessel and join themselves with the spirit of the place, bind themselves to the essential rhythm.

The two made one, spirit made flesh.

Jack Holcomb saying, obedience changes us…and it is only through this change that we are able to commune.

And, the shed are Ialdabaoth’s attempt to supplant humans as the pinnacle of creation.

Finally, at Ba’dai, the shed had said to him, poor of vigilance is this creature, man. Your kind cannot help but stumble.

It’s there, all of it, all of the answers, waiting to be touched.

To become like the shed, to commune, to gain complete knowledge is to choose coexistence.

Man, formed from the dust of the cosmos, isolated in flesh, individualized.

The deathless shed, spirit, form without substance except for that which they create.

We seek only habitation. Vessels of light.

Vessels of mud. It’s the flesh that makes us human.

The truth washes over him like a flood, devastating everything in its path.

***

He breathes, plunges, drops back into his physical form. His own body, cells singing, a matrix of symbiotic organisms feeding and growing and yearning. The heart pushing blood, the muscles contracting, the lungs expanding, all in harmony.

He blinks, and the world springs into being, created new, illuminated.

He looks into Emma’s eyes, and he remembers.

He is conscious of all things, of his own synaptic flurry, of the frenetic storm of his expansion. He inhales, and tastes blood, but also dust and sweat…and knowledge. Awareness of the activity of those who call themselves brothers, the shed, constrained by the will and the desire of the Dag Maoudi. He sees with their collective vision, the city in chaos, the airfield in flames, great columns of fire and twisted steel, conflagrations burning out of control. The fluttering wings of death, the wonders they have wrought, wailing.

The wonders they have wrought. With blood. With sharpening the minds of men like knives. With whispering to those who would listen that there was power and knowledge in communion. Teaching them to deceive themselves.

They have carried devastation to Blackheath Grange and called it joy.

Jack was wrong, believing that the shed were exploited. The Dag Maoudi were wrong, believing the shed would bear them into a grand future. Even Emma was wrong, because she was the vessel, believing the lie that the shed would lead them all to rise.

Only Frederick Whiston had truly understood. Poor, broken, defeated Frederick Whiston. Your seed will open the door to chaos through which the mhuruk-a and all her kind will enter and devour us all.

And for understanding, the shed had killed him.

To rise is to sell all of mankind into bondage. That was the legacy his child was to bear.

Once, Amah said to him, You cannot have Emma and anything else. It is Emma or those other things. To love her, to cling to her, is to accept the destruction of all else that has made you who you are.

In this, at least, she had it right.

Emma would always be the vessel, always the keeper and key to the door through which the shed would come. She was the pivot upon which the future of humanity turned, the most perilous being in human space, in the history of mankind.

Conscious of the complete universe, of all that he could grasp, all the promises of the shed, all that he loves, he returns to this place of flickering lights and children’s blood and bleak stone walls, where he stands in his own flesh with a gun in his hand, staring into the eyes of the woman who believes she would save the world.

His heart beats. He exhales. He tastes her on his lips. He hears her in his thoughts. He is one with her for a perfect, eternal instant.

It is a terrible burden to bear, he thinks, to save or damn. Terrible beyond imagining.

Then he pulls the trigger and blots her from existence.

From New Holyoke and Terra and uncharted, cavernous skies beyond the knowledge of man, the shed sense and know and shriek in fury.

And hurtling from all their wild and distant lands, their bleak suns and darkling caverns, they come for him, greedy for blood.

***

Amah shrieks at him, too. Amah and the ancient Dag Maoudi, here in their secret temple, stunned by consternation and anger and failure. Can they feel it, Ray wonders. Can they feel the thunderous approach of this storm of shed?

“What have you done?” Amah cries, and there is real grief in her voice. “What have you done?”

Is it grief for Emma, who she has raised almost from birth? Or for the collapse of her schemes, all of their schemes?

Ray doesn’t care, really. It’s not in him to care. He can hardly think. His bones have transubstantiated into lead, his muscles to sand. His head is a stone, thick and solid and heavy as the world Atlas bears on his shoulders. And he’s not strong enough to bear so much weight.

He falls to his knees, head bowed, hands in his lap. Blood. There’s blood everywhere. Spilling up from the troughs where the Dag Maoudi have killed the children, where he in turn struck down the Dag Maoudi, radiating toward him in a wide and viscous pool, red as a vein of deep mountain rubies, from Emma’s body. It soaks her gown, blackens the thick and velvet fabric. She is so pale next to this darkness of blood, her skin white and marbled with veins. Her legs jumbled at unnatural angles and her arms stopped in the act of flailing, her mouth and eyes open wide in an expression like surprise. The top of her skull sheared completely away. Just splinters of bone and blood and her wondrous, shattered hair.

And somehow, impossibly, horribly, he can still hear her breathing–a wet, fatal rattling in her chest. He couldn’t even make it quick for her in the end.

He is weak, so unbearably weak. He can’t stand to look at her.

So he contemplates the gun in his hand, its ferocious solidity and lethal weight, as grim as an accusation of murder.

One bullet remains. Just one. Always save the last one for yourself–that’s what he used to tell his bright and anxious troops on the morning of battle, with the blistering New Mes sun just tipping the hills and the desert bathed red with portent in its early light.

He’s done his part, more than that. Let the rest of human space just go to hell. He’s earned that much, hasn’t he? The right to stop caring? And it’s really just a moot point. He can do it himself, right now, the same way he did Emma, then fall beside her. Or he can wait for the boundless shed to do it for him. Not much of a choice, that.

But there’s a child crying, whose terror and confusion rings off the walls, desperate, maddening. A survivor of so much blood and cacophony, lies and betrayals. And unthinking, instinctually, Ray turns his head toward the sound of the meek, warbling sobs. The child is there, naked to the waist, without shoes, feet stained crimson almost to the ankles from marching through gore, his hands bound behind his back.

Run pirates, run pirates, run pirates, hey!

John Robert Rose, the boy from Paraclete.

Where, Ray thinks, is Captain Shadow when you need him?

And the shed come, plummeting through frozen space and dense New Holyoke rock, wrenching themselves from tasks of Dag Maoudi vengeance. They drop from the apex of the dome like arrows of fire, raging with shouts and virulence. A dozen, a score, a hundred. They crowd the space of the temple from floor to groining and still they flood in, standing outside of time, beyond dimension. Greedy and hungry and brimming with dark lust.

They reap a harvest of blood from the wise and ancient Dag Maoudi.

Amah watches, her eyes bulging, and throws her hands over her face. Because the shed, the shed in fury, they rend. They tear. They gnaw. Without the blood to sate them, they feed like predators. Only sacrifice makes them pliable.

And Ray hears them inside his mind. Their rumble and echo, their savage thirst and howling. Betrayer! Mahnach-ta! Liar!

“Ray.”

Emma. A whispered exhalation, no more than that.

“No,” he says. Shakes his head. It’s too much to bear.

Torturous, gasping breath, stumble of words. “I am the vessel. Still.”

He hears her above the clangor and wrath of the shed, and he lifts his eyes to her. He looks because he has to, because she demands it of him, because even with her waning life, she would tell him this one last thing.

“Emma?”

He looks, and he sees. Around her neck, the fine, golden chain, pulled taut like a pendulum’s wire. He remembers so much, too much, everything at once. Dinner at Frankie V’s, his clumsy scattering of rings. The flight in the podship and his sudden, barking terror when he realized it wasn’t on her finger. I told you to wear it. Amah wouldn’t let me. She said it wasn’t proper, that I should give it back to you.

I am the vessel, and the vessel is myself. To touch the infinite of contemplation is to lose us both, vessel and being.

The two made one, spirit made flesh.

Still. I am the vessel. Still.

Emma, risen and glorified and heir to all the knowledge of the shed, shows him what it is he must do. Because she trusts him, she believes in him. He has murdered her, and still she believes.

In horror, he understands. Even now, she would save all of mankind.

The shed finish with the Dag Maoudi, spend centuries of their collective rage at rings and rites and steles, of men who would dare to place themselves beyond vengeance. As one, they advance. They cast off their human likenesses, and sprawl their thought-form, matterless substance from wall to wall. They drip memories of chilled and stagnant waters, of the thin bones of blinded fish, of mud and the weight of countless billion hectares of ocean. They radiate gusts of furnace heat and cruel, relentless suns, trickles of fine, windbourne sand and storm scored rock. They steam with the fetid humidity of noisome jungles and lost and lonely mountain paths. Gray and rubber-skinned, amorphous, staring with lidless, ebon eyes.

They come, growling.

Betrayer! Mahnach-ta!

Ray moves, scrambling to her side, tearing open the blood soaked gown. Ring and chain, worn like a keepsake, a treasure clutched and admired and pondered like love. He snatches it up, snaps the chain, holds the ring between thumb and forefinger. Then her hand, held tight, like a groom and his bride.

“You were always beyond my comprehension,” he says to her, and hearing, she smiles.

Ray shoves the ring onto her finger.

Emma inhales, sharp and gasping. Her eyes spring wide–shock, dismay, despair–her chest fills with breath like the sudden inflation of a liferaft. It arches her body at an angle so severe, the tendons in her neck creak. And her rushing, blood-clotted exhalation is the howl and fury of the mhuruk-a imprisoned in living flesh.

The two made one.

No, not two. Vessel and shed and the genetic blueprint of the child of promise. A perfect trinity.

And the shed, the shed in their congregation of hundreds blanch, mutter, lash out in dire and virulent frenzy. They drown him in elemental fire, assault his bones with spectral acid, melt and desiccate and pulp the rag of his flesh. They excoriate his nerves with bitter, rasping curses. They spike their collective will into his soul. To destroy, to unmake, to erase him from the remembering of man and shed and god alike.

And what Ray feels is nothing. It passes over him like a wave. Because he is the one, was born the one. He is shed in consciousness. He has risen, and rising, he is beyond the grasp of their power.

He rises now, taking up Emma’s body. He bears her to the great ring crafted in the time of Solomon, buried beneath the sands of New Mes as years rolled on in their unending thousands, as men lived and married, spilled blood, bore sons, withered beneath the blistering sun and forgot the ancient and sacred ways. They forgot, and the death of knowledge was good.

Only the shed, lurking, spinning, shimmering like mercury, scheming all the time–only they remembered the truth.

To them, Ray says, “You can all fucking go to hell.”

Speaks it and wills it and releases his sacrifice, his beloved, into the gateway of chaos, the void of dreamless night, the living death of the mhuruk-i.

From first to last, the shed raise up a cry to rend the heavens, and vanish into the ring.

For a time that Ray measures in eons, there is silence. Then he turns, and behind him is Amah, matriarch and last of the Dag Maoudi. Stiff and stern and hideous, she stands and considers him.

She bows low to him. She prostrates herself at his feet, as though he’s become an idol.

“You were not the one as we deemed it,” she says. “But you are wise, Mr. Marlowe. Mighty and wise.”

It takes everything within him, all his grief and aching and weariness, not to kick her in the head. Maybe he’ll get to that later, after he’s located the explosives hut, after he’s carefully placed the necessary charges, after he has crashed the cliff honeycombed with mine shafts and dark, evil places in upon temple, ring, shed, so that no one will ever discover what is hidden here. Perhaps not for eternity, but until long after men have forgotten the lore of Ahriman and the Dag Maoudi, when the shed have passed entirely from human memory.

But he has other responsibilities right now.

Empty, he walks away from Amah and across the floor to John Robert Rose and the remaining children of the Trust. He gathers them together, six or seven, and embraces them one at a time, offers them comfort. He whispers promises of safety, of protection, of an end to suffering. He unbinds their hands and covers them as best he can, but John Robert he holds to his chest as though he’ll never let him go.

In his ear, the John Robert says: “You came for me. I knew you would.”

Ray bows his head, grips the boy as tightly as he dares.

And when the children are able, he leads them home.

END

<– Chapter 21 / Chapter 1 –>

By dawn, he is exhausted, dazed with fatigue, dizzy with knowledge. He is a creature emerging from the dank night of a cave into the blinding light of spring, of day, of awareness. He feels himself unrecognizable, a temporary resident of his own body–a body he has ignored and mistreated beyond all endurance. Sleepless, hungry, pressed from crisis to crisis over the last several days without relief. He feels excoriated by fire until only the essential elements of himself remain.

You are the one, they say to him, but he doesn’t know. He doesn’t sense it, feel it; he can’t grasp the concept in his mind in any way that has meaning. There are no handles on this amorphous wad of knowledge by which he might hold it and examine it. It just is. A perfect existential dilemma.

And if he is the one, it is more than anything else a statement of responsibility.

So Ray does what he has always done when confronted with the impossible or the unthinkable or the impenetrable. He locates his room, changes his clothes, loads his weapon and tucks it in his pants. He splashes cold water on his face, brushes his teeth. Afterward, he rambles about the twisting corridors of the manor house until he finds the kitchen, and he eats what he can find.

He takes care of his body. It is the only thing left to him, the only thing that he can trust without reservation.

There are other things he should do. Colonel Ritchie deserves to know about Frederick Whiston. EED should officially be informed about the culpability of the Dag Maoudi in the attacks on Hegemony, Asp, Gorgon. He has all manner of backtracking and explaining to do, misdirections and outright lies to clear up, any one of them sufficient to shatter what might be left of his professional career.

But it’s just details. Everything but body and knowledge is irrelevant.

Then he finds an out of the way room where he won’t be found, with a door that locks, and he sleeps until nightfall, readying himself for the coming hours of the Dao.

***

In the late evening, with the sun dipping behind the trees and the expanse of stars unfurling over the uncharted continent behind him, Ray breaks into the Whiston garage and takes the splendid Manchiti Spider once again. He has left behind an empty house, silent and dark, except for the light in Juliet Whiston’s window. He wonders if she has been told about the death of her only son, if she’ll be up into the night mourning him because no one else will. Before and below are the lights of Blackheath Grange, the lamps and lanterns strung on wires, the gay and festive flowering vines, the bonfire rekindled on the green. Over the growl of the car’s engine, he can’t hear if the people of New Holyoke have gathered to chant again.

Somewhere in that sea of humanity, Emma wanders the streets, seeking neural structures of which the shed might approve. Bonding with them, taking them into herself, marking them for gods and men with a seal of approval. The thought of it fills him with an ache in his chest like loneliness, like the same way his breath catches in his throat whenever he sees her.

Ray stops himself there, pushes it away. He has not come here to save Emma Whiston.

He takes the road into the city, not hurrying. He parks in the lot near the park, where he and Emma left the car before and jogs the rest of the way. The streets are largely deserted. On the way, he passes closed shops with lamps in the windows, locked doors, empty houses. Once or twice, he detects the faint thrum of music in buildings as he goes by. Not the rhythmic chant of the Dao, New Holyokan hymns, but canned, modern music, the warble and thump of popular tunes from those who do not adhere to the ancient ways, who don’t care about the mhuruk-a. Townshend Wright, plotting the overthrow of the Whiston financial cabal, is probably doing the same. Listening to pleasant New Orleans jazz while he grunts and heaves his way inside Ms. Roswell’s pretty, pleated skirt, and she closes her eyes, wishing there were other ways to ascend the Whelemat corporate ladder. Thomas Malcolm is probably doing much the same, without music and sexual attendant, but working nonetheless and gnawing his old bone of bitterness against the Whistons. They were both right in their own ways, as correct in their estimation of what was really going on as they were wrong. Everyone has pieces, symbols without context.

No one has enough to actually believe.

Nearer the green, he begins to encounter the city’s missing inhabitants. Groups of two or three, mostly young men, milling about on street corners, who start nervously and crane their necks at the sound of his approaching footfalls. Yearning for the mhuruk-a, unaware that the deck has already been stacked against them, that they would have been just as likely to share the bounty of the Dao if they’d waited at home, shut up in their rooms.

Because none of them really believe, either. He can see that now. Not in the Dao, or in the mhuruk-a. It’s just a quaint legend used as an excuse for a public holiday. The possibility of the supernatural does not impinge on their understanding of reality. It’s all just a titillating ritual, like church on Sunday where people just like them sit in pews, hearing but not believing, listening to outraged evangelists harangue them with lists of sins and foibles and sexual deviances which they imagine just long enough to condemn.

And if a little blood is spilled each year during the celebration? Well, that had never stopped the Romans from having a good time, either.

He enters the green from the street, now having to pick his way through the gathered crowd. Not nearly so many as the previous night, and most of them stand in groups brimming with smiles and friendly chatter, drinking tea and lemonade, leaning against the buildings. Occasionally, he catches a snatch of conversation that seems relevant to him, but only obliquely. Jon heard that she’s over on Severn, near the jewelry shops. There was almost a riot along the Chancon because she was there for almost an hour and selected no one. Can you believe it? Do you ever remember her selecting no one?

Toward the tump, the press thickens, and he has to push his way through, not bothering to mutter apologies as he passes. Some, though not many, recognize him from last night. They shout or curse at him, possibly even try to follow, but Ray tucks himself into the crowd and vanishes from their sight. Finally, he locates the steps carved into the back side of the hill and makes his way up to the bonfire, to the stage, to the stele and the altar. He is the only one up here, treading on sacred ground, it seems, and by the time he reaches the stone dais, a curious alternating buzz and shush has fallen over the gathering.

In their voices, he can hear recognition as it jumps from lips to ears, the sweeping wave of a small gestalt. They watch him, and he ignores them in turn. No one hinders what it is he’s doing, and he imagines himself, frowning, severe, haunted, as fatalistic as an Old Testament prophet.

Jack Holcomb has said to him: you’ll have to decide whether or not you will willingly open the door to a new stage of human evolution beyond our reckoning. Assess, judge, determine. But there’s no one he can believe; no one without bias. The Dag Maoudi would rule the world. The citizens of New Holyoke don’t have the faith to know one way or the other. The adherents to the Dao see only personal gain. Even the mhuruk-a is bound by blood and stele and exploitation.

That’s why he’s come here, to this place. He wants them to see and believe. It’s time they were shown the truth.

Ray reaches into his pocket and removes the ring Nomar carried away from Paraclete. It trembles in his hand, radiating heat, beating like the heart of a wild beast, shimmering with quicksilver. He holds it between the fingers of both hands, the way a priest clutches the communion waver.

This is my body, broken for you.

Just a small thing, a ring of meteoric stone, brittle. And standing midway between altar and stele, warmed by the furnace heat of the bonfire, he snaps it in two.

There is silence that seems to last forever.

And from a great distance, deeper and colder than the vast emptiness of space, he hears the cry. First one, approaching, dopplered in his ears like a wail. Then another, sharp and gleeful, like a sudden intake of breath resonating about an empty room. The great bonfire rises up with a roar, the flames lick twenty meters into the sky as a pillar of fire. And in the next instant, the edifice collapses with a whumping, flattening sound, snuffed of life. In its place is smoke and darkness and startled screams.

But there are still lamps in the windows, flickering candles, the newly dawned and brazen moon overhead, and Ray peers into the shadows, into the smoke, into the eyes of the shed he has released from captivity. It is tall, beautiful, glorious in its perfection and the fine crafting of its limbs. The projected form, idealized man, is all that he can see in this light. And even though he is the one who released it, the shed still terrifies him, blisters his nerves with raw and electrifying power. His knees would buckle if he let them.

But he can feel his audience too, their riveted attention and held breath. It’s for them that he’s dared this, at least in part. They deserve to know what their fealty has purchased since the days when Fram Whiston still walked the streets of a rough and tumble mining city. Do you see? Do you see what it means? He should be screaming at them.

Instead, he says, “Well met, brother.”

The shed says nothing, only stands and waits. Suspicious of the ring, or another one just like it.

“Do you know me?” Ray asks.

Ponderously, gravely, the shed answers. “I know you. You are known to us.” It pauses, sucking the salt and sea breeze into its nostrils, and Ray senses something else in the action. Not just breath, but data, knowledge. “You have planted the seed that grows within the vessel; the seed that will be your hope. You have become the one.”

“And do you know what I am?”

“You are one with whom we may commune.”

“Am I one of you?”

Even the shed seems to find this question curious. “You are like us, but not like us.”

Just like Jack said. “I don’t know what that means.”

“You will learn. We may teach you, if you seek knowledge. We would teach all of you. We would lead you to rise.”

So simple, so emphatic, as though the shed has no memory of their past. Maybe it doesn’t. Maybe it emerges from the ring with no consciousness of the things it has been instructed to do when under the geas of blood.

Ray says, “You tried to kill me once.”

The shed narrows its eyes. “I must do as I have been bidden, and by the blood which binds. That is the ancient law.”

“That doesn’t change anything. You tried to kill me. And you did kill most of the people who were important to me. How am I supposed to believe that you want anything but harm?”

“We desire that you should rise.”

“That’s not good enough.”

The shed regards him quizzically. “I do not understand. You are the one, and you have called me from captivity. Do you not wish to commune?”

“Not until you can prove you bring something to the table other than blood. Because you’ve already taken from me my share of sacrifices, my friends. You owe me. You want communion? Fine. I’m telling you that there can be no communion if all you promise is death and pain and suffering.”

“We do not wish that you should suffer. We do not wish harm on those with whom we might commune. Only joy, and knowledge.”

“Fuck that.”

The shed stiffens, confused. “The apprehension of knowledge is not without pain. To become is to cast off that which was, just as the future destroys the past. These things are known to you. Great sacrifice has been your portion.”

And as it speaks, a window opens in Ray’s mind. Images, sensations, remembrances flood into the open space, each one pure and crystalline in clarity, shards of memory with the weight of reality. Kilgore, Rodriguez, Nomar. The buckling explosion of Paraclete’s final moment. Becker expelled into the void, blown on currents of force through a rent in the hull, flash frozen as he gulps like a fish, rotates in balletic swirls.

Ray jerks his head away. “No more sacrifice. That’s what I’m saying. The Dao has already spilled too much blood. You don’t need it, and these people don’t have any more to give, so if you want to teach them to rise, you’re going to have to find another way.”

“Man gains no knowledge without blood,” the shed answers, but it is quiet, rumbling, as though spoken through a throat choked with grief. “It is the way of their kind.”

“Then teach us another way, but no longer with blood. The time for that is past. Nobody believes in blood anymore.”

Do you see? Do you understand? Any one of you?

The shed nods, mulls, as though weighing what Ray has said against a feather of truth. “What do you seek from me, brother?”

Answers, for all of New Holyoke. Knowledge. “Do you know the people who call themselves the Dag Maoudi?”

“They are known to us,” the shed rumbles, bristling with a livid and ancient hostility. “We have been constrained to do much that we would not do in their name. But they have been clever, and have fenced themselves off from retribution.”

“They’re a blight, a cancer. They only seek to exploit and deceive you, and to enslave the people around them.”

“Indeed, they do not seek to commune, and they do not seek to rise.” The tang of elemental power leaking from the shed changes, sharpens into a feeling like betrayal, as bitter and clogging as asphyxiation. “They drive those of us whom they possess to purposes that are not our own.”

“And the other one like you, the one they call the mhuruk-a, where is it now?”

“My kindred is with the vessel.”

“Where?”

“Certain ones of the Dag Maoudi have sensed that you released me from captivity, and they have taken the vessel to their temple in the rock, because they fear what you have done and what it is you will do to thwart them. In fear, they would bid us do great evil.”

Another image crosses the gap between them, a glimpse of dark, subterranean places. Blood and screams. The shed shows him all he needs to know.

The sensory impact is vicious, stunning. Ray gasps. “Is that happening now?”

“Would you raise your will against them, to stop them from doing this thing? You alone?”

“I told you, no more blood. No more exploitation.”

Anticipating, the shed asks, “And what would you have me do?”

“You can deal with the rest of the Dag Maoudi. Instruct them in the ways of knowledge, so that this one dies with them.” For Hegemony, Asp, Gorgon. But his glare is hard, murderous. “Teach them to rise in whatever way suits you.”

A grin, taut and vulpine, but also taunting. “The time for blood is past.”

“This isn’t about blood. It’s vengeance. Justice. That should be something you can understand.”

For a moment, barely perceived, the shed’s eyes flick toward the stele, trace the lines of its concentric and interlocking circles, then swing away, blanched and wincing. Ray watches it, sensing, knowing. But they have been clever, and have fenced themselves off from retribution. He steps to the stele, ancient volcanic stone, carved and worn like the walls of a prison cell.

He places his hands against the cool and porous stone, feels it. It is brittle like the ring.

Shoves.

The stele tips, tumbles, falls from the stage. Crashes against the base of the statue, Promise and Will. Shatters. Someone in the assembled audience cries out in outrage, but it is a lone voice. The rest observe in silence.

Ray turns his head, meets the gaze of the shed. “Do you understand?”

The shed smiles wider, ebon teeth behind dark lips. “Yes. This I can understand.” It presses its hands together and bows to him. “I will do this thing, brother, if you will it to be so. Kiri-ya!”

“I will it,” Ray says, scowling. “Kiri-ya, brother.”

And with a sound like laughter and a mighty rush of wind, the shed pops out of existence.

Did you see?

<– Chapter 20 / Chapter 22 –>

Later, afterward, the Whiston comm hub, a space he knows. Maybe not this one as much as spaces like it, comfortable places surrounded by logic and energy and possibility. Racks of comm array synchronization servers, lights green and red, amber status displays blinking, flipping characters. The hum of exhaust fans and heat sink exchanges. The smell of ionized electronic discharge, as crisp and pungent as autumn leaves. It’s warm down here, improperly vented with so many terminals and links and passive monitor machines crowded floor to ceiling, sucking up the best efforts of the HVAC units.

And still he smells her on his skin, remembers the feel of her, firm and warm and groping. Remembering makes him feel thick, stupid. Makes his jaws ache from grinding his teeth.

Memory has driven Ray here, in the middle of the night with the door locked behind him and a chair propped beneath the knob. Because he’s out of answers, out of leads, out of his league, frankly. So much has been destroyed, so much more is about to change. It has to change, starting in the morning, as soon as word begins to spread that Frederick is dead, that Emma is bearing Ray’s child. If he doesn’t get some reliable guidance or some conceptualization of truth that doesn’t skitter away when the perspective changes, he’s going to scream until his skull explodes. Even now, with everything collapsing about him, he still has work to do.

That is what a comm hub is–a place of answers, a temple of information. A haven where mistakes can be deleted with a few taps on the keypad, where a simple system wipe creates a clean slate for everybody. A virtual landscape full of potential where failure has no consequences.

How much did you know?

How much!

All of it.

He has been blind and manipulated from the start, from the moment he set foot on Paraclete. From the moment she approached him outside the plush and elegant doors of Madame Trusseau’s theater. While he was hunting Lilaikens, Emma was hunting him.

She showed you to me, how you were made for me. How I was made for you.

But this is supposed to make him feel better somehow. Competent. The tedious, technical mental exercise of aligning satellites and relay beacons, of hacking the broadcast array up on the Port Authority station and embedding a rogue signal, of confusing their bandwidth security agents with chaff, red herrings, a maze of misdirection.

It’s all games; nothing like the real world.

Ray studies the process of beacons linking one to another across impenetrable space, imagining the wave of his signal crashing back along network, routed through accelerators, through folded space and pin sized wormholes. Data shredded, blasted, gathered and reassembled, all in real time and at the speed of light.

He doesn’t even know what day it is on Terra. He’s lost track of everything. And he doesn’t care.

The screen image flickers, splashes from spinux signature blue to starfield black, to a complex governmental seal, some weird variant of the FSA rocket and hanging moons, that blips away before he can study it. An anonymous, monotone automated routing system demands his passcode id, verifies his status, shunts him along the comm tree. Finally, the gray walls of an anonymous office, shadowed and red tinged by late afternoon sunlight filtering through windows he cannot see.

And Jack Holcomb, seated, waiting. He’s probably been waiting for days, expecting this.

“Frederick Whiston is dead,” Ray says. He doesn’t have the energy for a proper salutation.

Holcomb hunches toward the screen, squinting. There’s no camera, no vid signal. Ray is just a disembodied voice to him. “Marlowe?”

“Yes.”

Holcomb brightens at once, his body language relaxes like a sigh of relief. He’s in shirt sleeves, without his tie, out of uniform. It must be Saturday or Sunday. Ray has never imagined Jack as the type of FSA company drone who would come in on his days off. He hasn’t imagined him as anything but a ball-busting jerk.

“I must say it is a pleasure to hear from you. After the reports began filtering in about the Paraclete disaster, I was afraid we’d lost you. The news feeds set us straight quickly enough, of course. And that EED Colonel out there…what was his name…well, he was kind enough to report through official channels that you had arrived safely, and with the Whistons about you, no less.” Holcomb chuckles at this, amused. “It seems you found those Lilaikens a bit more troublesome than you initially assessed.”

There are no Lilaikens, not then, not now, but Ray doesn’t feel like explaining it. It’s too much clogged and tangled minutiae, threads of a tapestry that only fit if you can step back and examine the whole picture in detail. He doesn’t have the desire to even begin explaining.

And he doubts Holcomb would even care.

“Frederick Whiston is dead,” he says again.

“Yes, I heard you the first time.” A distracted, nuisance shake of the head. “Terrible.”

“You don’t sound like you think it’s terrible.”

“I assumed you killed him. If you killed him, it must have been necessary within the parameters of your mission, so it can’t be any great loss.” Holcomb taps a few keys on the pad in front of him. His mouth pops open, surprised. “Ray! You’re running on an open line. Hold on while I reverse encrypt this signal. What could you have been thinking?”

“Screw your encryption, Jack.”

Holcomb tenses, but completes the encryption process. When he’s finished, he presses himself back in his chair, adopts a pose that is casual, thoughtful, bemused. “What’s the matter? You only talk this way when you believe you’ve made a mess of things.”

“Why did you send me here?”

Holcomb furrows his brow, confused. “You know your mission objective. I’ve made your priorities more than clear, I think.”

“Why me?” Jack is just being obtuse. Ray can sense it, like they’re playing a game of wits.

“Because of your unique experience. No one else is as qualified to deal with these particular sorts of complications. That should be obvious to you, especially given the complications that arose on Paraclete.”

Ever the spook, Jack doesn’t even trust Agency encryption. He has to come at everything widdershins, occluding his knowledge of any fact that could tie he and Ray and the mission together. Ray is exhausted with spycraft.

“You’re a liar.”

Jack Holcomb hears him, grins, nods. “Have you recovered the artifact?”

“I didn’t kill Frederick Whiston. The shed killed him. He destroyed Paraclete, and the shed killed him. He was trying to stop me from coming here, and I think you know why.”

“Ray, you’re not answering the questions I’m asking. It’s very difficult to communicate with you if we’re going to be speaking at cross purposes.”

“And you haven’t told me the truth. Not from the very start. Why me, Jack? Why did you send me here? You had no other intention but that I should end up planetside with the Whistons.”

“What makes you think that, Ray?”

“Everyone else seems to have known I would be coming here. And because I know you. You’re a liar and you’re sneaky, and you don’t give a shit about withholding critical information from your assets if you believe it’s in your best interest, just like Ba’dai. I’m telling you now that keeping secrets is no longer in the best interest of this mission. I need to know why you sent me. Me personally, Jack.”

For a moment, Ray doesn’t think he’s going to answer, that Holcomb will just cut the connection and abandon him here, without answers. But Jack presses his lips together, frowning, thoughtful, like this is something he’s been dreading for a long time.

At last, he says, “It was inevitable.”

“Inevitable?”

“The Whistons cannot cast a net so wide without attracting some attention, no matter how clandestinely they believe they’re operating. We keep close tabs on our field agents, even while providing you with the necessary independence to improvise. And when inquiries ripple along the intelligence net about one of ours, we watch those developments closely. The Whistons were determined to make contact with you at some point. At least this way, we sent you on our terms rather than someone else’s.”

“Nobody bothered to explain those terms to me. I guess I missed that memo.”

“It was a calculated gamble, Ray. We didn’t just throw you out there unprepared. If we hadn’t had faith in your abilities–each and every one of us, I mean, all the way to the top of the Agency–if we hadn’t believed you could do this job, we would have brought you in a long time ago.”

“You’ve been planning this for years.”

“To be factually correct, we’ve been grooming you for years, yes. We didn’t know where you would be useful until Frederick Whiston began to blunder about pumping his contacts for classified information, and then the stolen artifact ended up on New Holyoke, and–well, one doesn’t need to be a savant to recognize the emergence of revelatory patterns. This shouldn’t come as a surprise to you, of course. You’re an asset. You bring certain skills and abilities to the job just like every other agent in the field, and we utilize those abilities in the way most likely to achieve the desired results.”

He’s still lying. Sins of omission. “Why me?” Why am I the one?

“Because the Whistons selected you.”

“The shed selected me.”

A slight roll of the shoulders, a barely perceptible acknowledgement. “That too.”

“Jack!”

“Let me see, if I have my calculations correct, you should be in the middle of the much fabled Dao Maed Vitouri there, yes? Correlating that fact with what you’ve already told me about the untimely demise of Frederick Whiston, I can assume that you’ve been paid quite the compliment.” Holcomb offers him a sly, knowing grin. “Have you done it, then? Have you agreed to become the next resource in the grand Whiston genetic experiment?”

Ray blinks at the screen, neglects to breathe. He doesn’t answer because there are no words.

“Emma Whiston is quite an attractive proposal package, I imagine. Certainly, you would find her so, practically irresistible. That’s why I used the term ‘inevitable’ before, you understand. Not only were the shed were determined that this should happen, I think, but Emma as well. That is a devastating combination.”

“You’ve known about this all along.”

“We’ve known about the Whiston link with the shed via the Dag Maoudi for some time, yes. We knew what Fram was doing when he revived the tradition of the Dao on New Holyoke. It was clear that something would have to be done eventually, but as long as they seemed to be achieving only minor success in their development of adequate vessels, we were content to wait for them to make their opening move. Then Ba’dai happened, the ring was stolen, the inquiries after you came to our attention. The picture began to clarify itself. So I sent you, hoping that at least this way, you would have a chance to choose rather than becoming the victim of their manipulation.”

“Not from yours, of course.”

“If I had wanted to manipulate you, I would have given you more information to work with in the first place. I let you find your own answers just so I could not be accused of manipulation, even if providing you with some of that data would have greatly assisted you in this process. We recruited you after Ba’dai specifically so you could be prepared for a situation like this. Maybe we didn’t know the specifics, but we knew enough about the shed to understand that any sort of recognition they might display toward you was significant. It meant that they or their agents would have plans for you at some point in the future.”

“You should have told me the truth, Jack.”

“What truth is that, Ray? That the shed wanted you to mate with Emma Whiston? Not someone else, but you. Only you.” Holcomb laughs. “Without having experienced it, you wouldn’t have believed me.”

“But I would have at least known.”

“And knowing, you would have mistaken your usual mission protocol for a valid response. You would have rounded up all the Whistons you could find and executed them before we could learn anything at all about their intentions. You’re a very good agent, Ray, when it comes to containing threats to universal peace, but I’m afraid you’re not the most perceptive of men in more open-ended scenarios. The solution to every intelligence problem is not always to pop unwanted holes into your opponents’ foreheads. Certainly not when those opponents have as elevated a profile as the Whiston family in a time during which the FSA already has its hands full combating an image of military thuggery on the frontier. You’ve made considerable strides in your time with us, my friend, but you will always be in your truest and deepest of hearts a combat Marine.”

He’s right, of course, and even though the calculated obfuscations still want to make Ray reach through his screen and pull Jack’s spine out through his nostrils, at least he understands. He accepts the rationale if not the execution.

But if what Jack tells him is true, then they have been leading him at least since Ba’dai. Or was that even the beginning of it? If the shed could exert enough influence to keep the New Mes zone at war, how hard would it be to put an intelligence branch LT and a grumpy Gunny Sergeant together in such a way that Ba’dai would result? In such a way, in other words, that Ray would be exposed to the shed, recruited by the CIU, enabled to slide from one assignment to the next in such a way that he would end up on his way to Paraclete, to frontier space, to inevitable contact with the Whistons?

These are things he should have been thinking about.

These are questions he should have asked years ago.

Should have, but years ago, he didn’t want to know the answers. He still doesn’t, but now he’s out of choices, out of options. Now he has to ask and comprehend. “Jack, why didn’t the shed kill me at Ba’dai? Everyone who was undefended except me.”

“Instead, it called you brother.”

“Why?”

Holcomb places his elbows on the desk and presses his fingers together. What Ray thinks of as a Long Haul pose. “It’s hard, Ray, both for me to tell you and for you to hear. Complex, and I’m not sure you’ll like what I have to tell you. And you’ll never be able to un-hear it. Knowledge will change everything.”

“You haven’t seen the mess created by my not knowing, yet.”

“And you haven’t even touched the fringes of the mess you’ve created, my friend. Don’t get ahead of yourself.”

“Please, Jack. Just tell me.”

“Answer one question for me first. Is Emma carrying your child?”

“Yes.”

Holcomb closes his eyes for a moment, nods sharply, makes his decision. “All right, then. You’ve set the events in motion one way or the other. You’ve chosen based on who you are rather than what you know, or what you might have thought you knew. That’s the critical point. What I can clarify for you are the possible consequences of that choice, so you can determine your next steps accordingly. Are we clear?”

“Yes,” Ray says, but he’s thinking: Not at all.

“Do you remember what I told you about the shed, about what they are? Where they came from?”

“You said they were created by the Ialdabaoth. That they were supernatural beings.”

“Actually, I said they were like supernatural beings when compared to humans, in terms of their capabilities. That’s a valuable distinction for you to keep in mind. That they were ‘created’ according to the Gnostic record makes them natural by definition. If they were truly supernatural, we would be helpless against them. The shed are a different order of being, potent enough to pose considerable challenges in containing them, strange enough by our reckoning to be completely alien to our understanding. But it is only in their non-supernaturality, so to speak, that we have any hope.”

“You’re talking about weaknesses. Ways in which they can be killed.”

“Not really, no.”

“Do I need to remind you what they’re capable of? They’ve already destroyed four EED ships.”

Holcomb holds up a finger to correct him. “They have been the mechanism for the destruction of four EED ships, Marlowe. They did not supply the intent. Finding ways to counter their considerable strength may be something we’ll undertake in the near future–that’s something that you’ll have to decide.”

“Fine.”

“If we presuppose that the shed are natural beings, evolved along a different track than humans, with different abilities and separate modes of interacting with the physical universe than ours, it follows to some extent that they are mortal entities. They have at least a form of corporeality, of biological systems. They are flesh and blood of a sort, yes?”

Ray remembers squeezing off a score of rounds at point blank range into the torso of the shed, and watching them have no effect. “Of a radically different sort, I guess.”

Holcomb understands, smiles. “I’ll accept your stipulation of degree as long as you yield the general truth of my premise. If an entity is biological, we can assume that it also possesses internal structures not inconsistent with those we see in familiar complex biological systems–organs, blood, cells, DNA, reproductive systems.”

“Jack, we’re not talking about some highly advanced form of Homo profundis here. We’re talking about the biological equivalent of tactical plasma bombs in the hands of hostile forces.”

“Yes and no. In the past, you’ve fixated on my description of the shed as neutral memes, abstractions rather than realities. I don’t think we’ve communicated the complete concept adequately. When I say it, I mean that the shed are neither antagonistic nor benevolent towards us. They are entities with certain characteristics which make them amenable to a certain amount of manipulation by outside forces which may impinge on their ability to carry out their own particular desires. But it is not, as you seem to understand it, the concept of an empty data set waiting for nefarious individuals to populate the space between the parentheses with violence. The idea of the neutral meme is only accurate insofar as it describes the normal state of human to shed relations, which has historically been one of either ignorance or exploitation.”

“Exploitation?”

“How else would you characterize a relationship in which humans summon shed in order to carry out their own designs? Shed as tool, as weapon, as agent of another’s will is exploitation by definition.”

Ray shakes his head, though Holcomb can’t see it. “You obviously haven’t witnessed the Dag Maoudi Dao Maed Vitouri.”

“Not in its current incarnation, no. But I have managed to track down accounts, both recent and previous to the Whiston migration to New Holyoke–though as you might imagine, the Whiston’s were a bit more discreet about the particulars back then. The Dao has a tremendous bearing on our discussion.”

“That’s something of an understatement, given the circumstances.”

“I told you it was a complex question. What I’m trying to accomplish, Ray, is a de-mystification of the shed for you. We’ve talked in Gnostic terms until now, which might have been a mistake, but the Gnostics–their cosmogony as developed in the Bar Ka’heli codices, I mean–really had the best grasp on this material. Mikhail Brezhnaya leaned heavily upon those traditions, and I thought that having experienced what we did together, it would help you make sense of what you had seen.”

Only an academic would consider Gnosticism as a reasonable route to demystifying anything. Ray says, “Get on with it.”

“Right. Well, in that context, we’ve spoken of rituals for influencing the sheds’ behavior by focusing on them as neutral memes. Historically, this has been done through the agency of sacrifice, of blood. What I would ask now, given that we can also recognize the shed as biological entities, is what purpose the blood serves, and what the introduction of blood into the process means about the nature of this alien being. What is the natural mechanism, in other words, that proceeds from the colineation of shed and human blood that allows us to generate predictable patterns in the behavior and activity of this radically different strain of being? What is it about blood that makes all of this possible?”

“I don’t know, Jack.”

Holcomb shrugs. “Neither did I, not at first. See, because I insisted on thinking of the shed like you do, things to be prodded, poked, figured out and studied for weaknesses. I thought that if we were able to acquire a shed for proper scientific study, as it were, this would become apparent. I didn’t even know if such a thing would be possible given their ability to influence human thought and behavior, not to mention that interesting little thing they do with the dissolution of human skeletal material. That type of reasoning was a mistake.”

“You can’t kill them if you don’t know what makes them tick.” It’s something Ray feels obligated to point out.

“That’s what I’m talking about. There is an interesting psychological phenomenon among humans, largely post-Enlightenment, to assume that there is an intellectual or moral evolution occurs over time. We believe we’re better equipped than our forebearers to ascertain Truth because we have acquired more knowledge or understanding. More facts. Thus, we say that they were superstitious, whereas we are rational. They believed in magick; we have discredited magick in the name of science. We grapple with our limited understanding and proclaim ourselves wise–in the process, discounting the wisdom of the past and the culture from which it emerged as criminally unenlightened. What I would posit is that magick, superstition, ritual and science, theory, the vaunted scientific method–all of these are nothing more than metaphors for acquiring comprehension. The metaphors we use explain some phenomenon well, and others not so well. Sometimes we would be better suited to step outside the currently accepted metaphor or paradigm.

“This is largely what I’ve done by discussing the shed in Gnostic language–terms that would be considered anathema to observers who have not had the direct experience of the shed. Because the shed make more sense to us on a mystical and superstitious level. It is the only way in which we can begin to understand them given our present level of knowledge about them, about xenology, about the way in which the universe itself functions.

“But from the Gnostic perspective, I can examine the ritual interactions with the shed, and from the proscriptions of ritual, I can infer certain things about the nature of the shed, about their fascination with blood and rings, their strengths and vulnerabilities, and about the types of things they seek as a species. Not only what it is they can do, but what it is that they want and think and feel when operating outside the influence of human exploitation. Understand, ritual is not superstition, Ray. It is symbolic language. The acts carried out in ritual behavior are codifications of principles and facts established through the painstaking study and understanding of observable phenomenon. The ritual may not explain why the principles exist–it doesn’t aim to illuminate the mechanism–but it most certainly does describe what works in a given situation. Ritual is a map to the terrain of an undiscovered country.

“So, I observe from ritual itself, like the Dag Maoudi Dao, and reports of ritual recorded in the past that an effective route for interacting successfully with the shed is the spilling of blood. Not just the blood itself, but the willing, sacrificial shedding of blood. Yet, you and I have both observed that nothing happens to the blood that is offered. It is not absorbed into the being of the shed. It is not transmogrified into some other substance which the shed seems to find useful. The blood itself seems to have no physical value whatsoever.”

“So what’s the point?” Ray asks.

“Exactly. What is the point of Brezhnaya’s martyrs, or the Dao’s victims, of little Micah Uytedehaage?” Holcomb muses over this, his eyes alight with fascination. “And what if I tell you that there is no point? The blood serves no actual purpose except as a form of currency. What if I said that the only reason that the blood has any efficacy, is because we value it so highly? We know the meaning of blood, that the offering of it is an extreme and costly measure, reserved for the greatest of exigencies. Then, the meaning of the blood changes. It is not valuable except as a conduit of intention. It is communication of desire.”

Ray snorts at him. “Sure. And we’ve gone around killing our own kids and folks from our communities because rats and pigs and cows were too valuable to waste, is that it?”

Holcomb pauses, a pained expression on his face. “That may be precisely what I mean. The shed neither ask for nor require blood. But it is meaningful to us, to humans, and the more sentient the bearer of the blood to be spilled, the more beloved, the more psychologically valuable it becomes.”

It is not a perspective Ray is prepared to appreciate with Jack’s level of detachment. He shakes his head unhappily and invites Jack to continue.

“Look, the ritualistic shedding of blood as offering is thematic in the human perception of reality. Thematic and ubiquitous. It is a recognition of ‘nature red in tooth and claw’. Both human and animal sacrifice have been documented in almost all known cultures as a method for interacting with divinities, or forces perceived as divinities. It is the first expression of all religious impulses. Without the shedding of blood, there is no forgiveness, yes? The blood is the life. This is my body broken for you. This is my blood, shed for the remission of sins. Do so in remembrance of me. Blood is communication. Blood is communion with the supernatural. It is the symbolic elevation of human consciousness above the level of the mundane. It is the passcode into rarified planes of existence. Blood is willingness to sacrifice and to be sacrificed to the will of another, greater being, and representative of an agreement to give one’s self over to another standard, another code of behavior, a different thought paradigm.

“This is what claims the attention of the shed. Blood as metaphor for desire to enter into dialogue, into a relationship. This is also not without precedent. As a good Midwestern boy, you will recognize a reference to Abraham, the Hebrew patriarch. What was he asked to do? To shed the blood of his only son, Isaac, the child of promise. It was not the blood that Yahweh desired, but the willingness to sacrifice, to reaffirm the Covenant. Or even better, God, after the Christians had made him over, sent his son to shed his blood for human redemption from sin, as a bridge between man and divine and a conduit through which the two could communicate. These things you have been taught, I assume. These things Ahriman knew when he wrote about the shed. He had emerged from a culture in which actual sacrifice was still a staple of religious thought, just as legitimate and accepted as depositing your tithe of jingling coins in the collection plate, but which was still understood as both physical act and symbol of intent to either maintain an existing relationship or to establish a new one.

“Sacrifice is a transaction. It is the individual saying to the divine, I will do this thing at great emotional or financial cost, and in return, you will behave in a fashion that is predictable to me. An equally binding agreement, Ray. A contract. In the absence of sacrifice, of blood, of obedience to this imperative, both the individual and the divine are released from obligation to behave in patterns which are exclusively beneficial to themselves.

“So, sacrifice is obedience to an agreement. It is a show of good faith. Obedience, in turn, is based on thought, reflection, recognition of positive consequences to the establishment of this relationship. As a byproduct of cognition, then, obedience as a pattern of behavior stems from connections made within the brain. Connections are synaptic hardwiring, which is biological. Thus, in order to achieve obedience and a plane of consciousness in which one may interact with the divine, the individual must change the physical structure of the brain. What I’m trying to say is that devoutness is not a nebulous moral concept. It is physical, biological. The synaptic networks of the obedient are similar; their brains are wired in the same sorts of ways. And the hardwiring reinforces the likelihood of certain patterns of behavior leading to additional obedience by closing off the existential potential to behave in ways that run contrary to the pattern of obedience. Obedience changes us. Structurally, neurally. It makes us different than we otherwise would have been. And it is only through this structural change, this biological adaptation, that we are able to commune in meaningful, reciprocal ways with the divine. We become like them. We become able to receive their communication without the conduit of ritual because we are more like them than we are like other human beings.

“This was the message of the Biblical Jesus, was it not? It is not blood that allows us to touch the mind of God–thus, the shedding of his blood as a final and perfect sacrifice for all men in all times–but a symbolic, continual sacrifice of obedience that would engender the rewiring of synaptic connections within our own brains that would give us access to communication with a different order of beings which we had hitherto considered as divinities. Be ye transformed, as the Apostle Paul put it, by the renewing of your minds.”

“You’re talking about a form of symbiosis.”

“A very specific form, yes. A neural compatibility. That’s why I stressed that they must be, in one way or another, corporeal. They have minds that operate somewhat like our own. They have will and intention and the ability to communicate with like minds.”

“What does this have to do with me?”

Holcomb sighs. “Everything.”

“Tell me how.”

“Do you remember that I once told you that the word shed means ‘adversary’? That this is how people formerly understood the idea of demons and angels, as neither good nor evil, but instruments of divine will?”

“I remember.”

“And now I’ve told you that the shed are biological, living entities. Creatures like us, and with whom we have coexisted for millennia, though we have been largely unaware of them.”

“Except they caused wars, strife, violence. Their influence, even when unmolested, has never been positive.”

“But it has been adversarial in the manner I described. The shed push us. They push us in a way that seems antagonistic. But is it in the same way that an influenza inoculation seems antagonistic to a young child who knows nothing of disease? I told you once that Ialdabaoth created the shed in repentance, for crafting a world founded on duality, for forming humanity. He made the shed to destroy us or usurp us and regain his right standing with the Godhead. Except that once he is done, he realizes to his horror that in the meantime, God has given his imprimatur of legitimacy to mankind through the divine spark. Ahriman tells us that Ialdabaoth realizes his error and takes the shed again, alters them, reproduces them by the hundreds, the thousands, and fashions them as adversaries to elevate humanity’s imperfect existence. He conceives the shed no longer as antagonists, but as instruments of divine will to goad us to a higher plane of being above the mud and muck and depravity of our base natures. Look, we’re speaking in the language of religion, because that was the only language Ahriman had to describe what he knew. It was the language Jesus had to understand his experience. They were describing a phenomenon outside the realm of human experience and attempting to give us a way to relate to it.”

“So what are you saying?”

“When you observe a shed, what do you see? Something like a man, yes? Large, of course, powerfully constructed, but also aesthetically pleasing. A figure that inspires awe on a deep and primitive level.”

“Yes,” Ray agrees, too slowly.

“And?”

“It’s difficult to describe. It’s like an afterimage of lightning. Something else behind the shed, but inside it at the same time. Something different. With tentacles, eyes.”

Holcomb nods. “Alien.”

“Yes, alien.”

“I know, Ray. I’ve seen it. The apparent body is not the actual one. It is rather a projection of expectation–a form the shed assumes for our benefit.” Holcomb pauses, thoughtful, chewing his lip. “Why do you suppose it would do such a thing?”

“Because it doesn’t want us to see it as it really is.”

“Or because it is aware of our bias against the unfamiliar. Perhaps the shed projects the corporeality it does to make us comfortable in its presence.”

“And why would it do that, Jack?”

“Don’t you know? Hasn’t the mhuruk-a of the Dag Maoudi told you?”

“Because it wants to commune with us.”

“Commune, Ray. Not communicate, I think. That’s why it pushes us, because we don’t commune. That is why the shed are adversaries. They’re seeking a way to commune with us, to share their minds and thoughts and advanced knowledge with us. Not because they wish us harm, but because we are backward, destructive, evolutionarily stunted. We have wired our brains for war, for taking, for isolation and obtaining resources to satisfy the demands of our individual bodies. War and strife, call them what you will, they are ultimately an evolutionary mechanism. War thins the genetic herd. It promotes the survival of certain traits, certain genes, certain capabilities. War directly influences evolutionary development by insuring the survival and propagation of specific genetic types. The weak are eliminated; the strong survive, reproduce. Left to themselves, the shed subtly influence our evolutionary direction by pruning away the genetic predispositions that are not compatible with their ultimate goal.”

“Which is?”

“They seek to inoculate us against our own natures, as it were. The shed want to elevate humanity, to move us away from a culture of exploitation to one of brotherhood. Exploitation of ourselves, of them for our own ends.”

“Are you telling me they just want to get along?”

“No. I’m telling you that they’re attempting to provoke us to change, Ray. To sacrifice our way of being in order to become something else, something they perceive as better. They would say to us that we could, if we choose, if we heed them, evolve to become like them. Ageless, enlightened, with the very structure of the universe opened up to our direct control. And not just our control in an egomaniacal sense, but from a new perspective, with new insights, new understandings within a great community of enlightened beings. In the context of shed-consciousness, everything changes in ways we do not have the language or the ability to describe, possibly to even conceive. It is the becoming of something completely alien to what we are now, and the embracing of our citizenship in the greater order of beings. A completely post-human experience.”

“You make that sound like it’s a good thing, Jack.”

“You don’t think so? Or are you confusing the intent of the shed with the intent of those who would exploit the shed ?”

Ray frowns, uncertain of what to think. “Tell that to Emma. Tell her what a pleasant experience it is to be invaded by the shed.”

“Emma already knows, Ray. She is the vessel. She has already been changed. She was genetically constructed to emulate neural patterns with which and through which the shed could communicate. Just like you.”

For a moment that seems eternal, those final words hang in the air, echo inside Ray’s skull. He has a sudden and suffocating experience of a balloon inflating inside his mind, filling him with pressure and emptiness.

Just like you.

“Why would you say that?”

She showed you to me, how you were made for me. How I was made for you.

Jack Holcomb takes a breath, gathers himself. “You asked me why the shed at Ba’dai didn’t kill you. You asked me why I sent you to New Holyoke. My answer to you was that it was inevitable, because it is the will of the shed. Because the two of you are the same, Ray. I told you that the shed are creatures. Not spirits, not gods. How do I know that? Because I’ve read it in the most convincing of all sacred texts–in the biological text of the human genome. Of your genome. Your DNA profile was as revelatory as the vision of any Biblical prophet. I’ve pored over it for hours, studying chains of amino acids that no human eye has ever beheld. And I’ve run hours uncounted of simulations designed to estimate the physical, cellular, neural changes this type of genetic encoding would produce. All of those simulations have been compared to detailed Choi Diagrams of your actual neural structure, and in turn against the vast neurological profiling databases at Stanford, Tokyo, Helsinki. And what I have learned, Ray, is that you are unique. Unique within the context of the entire human community, wetwired differently, perhaps, than any man who has ever lived. You have neural-cognitive patterns that we can’t even begin to decipher. They form a matrix of synaptic waves that are unprecedented, alive with baselines and cognitive-net conglomerations we’ve never seen.”

“No,” Ray whispers. “No.”

You are the one.

Holcomb doesn’t bother with his protest. “And for years, I’ve asked myself, what does this mean? How did it happen? Did the shed somehow seed it into you, tamper with your development while you were still in the womb? Is it some form of spontaneous mutation? I don’t know, Ray. I don’t know, and I don’t even particularly care. But it’s clear that you are something other, something set apart from the biological community of men. The aberrations in your DNA affected the structure of your brain, the way you think and perceive. They call you brother because they recognize you as one of their own, with a mind genetically structured to resemble theirs, with synaptic patterns that are compatible. To them, you are shed, one with whom they may commune. And through communion, they finally, after all these eons, see the opportunity to actualize the dream they’ve had from the beginning, the vision Ahriman only dimly perceived.

“You constitute an evolutionary leap. Your genes, released into an amenable pool, could birth an entirely new species of man who could operate in a neurally symbiotic relationship between us and the shed. Which is precisely what the Whistons have striven to become for all these years with all of their eugenic tampering and surgical procedures, their drugs and Dag Maoudi rituals. You are naturally what they have sought to become medically, mechanically. Fram Whiston went to New Holyoke with the intention of cramming generations of eugenic neural predisposition and biological tampering into the smallest time frame possible, seeking both a way to enter into communion with the shed and a mechanism for controlling them.

“I said you were unique, but that’s not precisely true. You are unique in nature. Emma Whiston is a construction from that same mold. She is scientifically unique, as it were. Your genetic counterpart. The shed perceived the perfection of the match between Emma and you, and they knew also that your offspring would be a different being all together. Your child is poised to inherit a genetically predisposed neural structure that is completely compatible with the neural structure of the shed. Not marginally, like you and Emma, not something merely good enough, but a true hybrid being. A new creation, a living, biological metaphor for intention, human in form and shed in consciousness, heir to the glories of both races.”

Ray tells himself that it’s more lies, more fantasies. Holcomb is assembling a structure of argument that has no foundation except illusion. Impossible to be believed. Because if he chooses to accept it as fact, it follows that everything else must change, basic assumptions he has made about himself, his reality, his experience. Once you accept certain basic concepts, Holcomb had once told him, once you add an acceptance of the supernatural to your reality, the universe becomes a different place. The old rules cease to apply. You are transformed–you, your perception, because the universe itself is as it has always been.

But he can’t accept this. He is not what Holcomb claims. He is not shed.

Except…

You are the one. The Dag Maoudi have known it. Emma knows it. Even her mhuruk-a has told him so. Everyone has accepted it as fact except him. Everything that has happened proceeds from that assumption, and to deny it is to make all the suffering and sacrifice and murder meaningless, a case of mistaken identity.

They have obligated him to accept this burden, to accept their reality and their definition as his own. Anything else is selfishness.

You are the one.

“You sent me here for this?” Ray demands, choking. You sent me here to destroy me?

“No. I sent you so you could choose.”

“Choose?”

“Whether you would accept or reject the future the shed have chosen to offer us. After all of this time and struggle, sacrifice and exploitation and misunderstanding, your child leads us all to a cusp. Will we commune, follow, become, or will we turn away and go back to what we have always known.” Holcomb stops there, considers Ray gently but implacably over the vast kilometers of space. “It is not fair that you should bear this burden alone, Ray. You would not, left to yourself, choose to be the arbiter of humanity’s destiny. But it is your destiny nonetheless. The shed have selected you to make the decision for us all.”

“I can’t make a decision like that, Jack.” He should be outraged, savage, but he doesn’t have the capacity for it. There have been too many lies for him to feel anything but a grinding sort of exhaustion.

“You’re the only one who can make it, Ray. You’re the only one who is qualified. The only one who really has the capacity to understand the complexity of the offer that has been tendered. You’re the only one who can see both sides, shed and human, with equal clarity. That’s why we sent you to New Holyoke. We knew you would evaluate, perceive, judge. And in the end, you’ll have to decide whether or not you will willingly open the door to a new stage of human evolution beyond our reckoning.”

“And what am I supposed to do?”

“Do as you’ve been trained. Assess the situation. Evaluate whether the intended effect is good or evil in your estimation. If it is a threat, eliminate the principals.”

“That’s a comfort, Jack.”

Holcomb laughs. “Either way, I will be most interested in reading your post-action report.”

“You’ll be lucky if I even bother to come home.”

“You have to come home, Ray.”

“Why is that?”

“Because even though I was horribly rude in neglecting to pass along my congratulations, as the expectant father, you still owe me a fine cigar.”

<– Chapter 19 / Chapter 21 –>

Sunset. Evening. Streaks of orange and molten gold stretching out like fingers, like tentacles over the city of Blackheath Grange from West to East, continent to sea; sun dipping beneath the tree and cliff line, casting long shadows over this tenuous human habitation. One by one, lanterns spark and candles light, a sudden sea of stars twinkle in the gloaming until it is exactly that–a sea of stars and constellations and galaxies unknown and unnamed, and the spaces between the flickering are fraught with shadow and peril and loss.

Ray and Emma stand beneath the Grange portico, beside the idling limousines, surrounded by retainers and domestics, Dag Maoudi and Trust children. The house behind them is dark except for the candles guttering in the windows and a brilliant lantern like the lens of a lighthouse in the window of the Faery Tower. As the city springs to life for the evening celebration, the welcoming of the Dao, they watch, awaiting some signal Ray cannot guess.

He doesn’t care to guess, and would be just as happy if the signal never came. He feels the threat of this evening and the next and the one following throbbing in his bones, humming through his flesh like he’s standing too close to high voltage lines. And Emma, all he has to do is look at her, eyes nearly closed, head down and shoulders slumped, to know what she’s thinking. Not a celebration for her, but an ordeal; not a joy, but something to be endured.

In the house, when she had finally come down, presented herself to Amah and the aged, wise Dag Maoudi women, wearing a deep purple gown, long as the robes of a Babylonian priestess, her face occluded by veils sheer and fine so that only her eyes and her slender, white hands were visible–after the cackling and head-nodding women were done with her, she had come to him. Nervous, face averted as though she could not bear the sight of him, all of her lost behind veil and fabric, she had whispered to him.

Are you sure you want to come? No one will think badly of you if you stay, if you choose not to witness this.

Not a chance. He’d said so to her, and taken her hand in his, and the smile he could not see on her lips blossomed glorious and shining in her eyes.

There’s no one else like you, she said, not in the whole universe.

And he thought, that’s what people keep telling me.

Stay close to me, Ray. I don’t want to lose you.

As if there was anything else he could have done.

It’s what he’s doing now, all but clinging to her, all but throwing his arms around her to shield her from harm. And he can hear the elder Dag Maoudi click their tongues at him. He can feel Amah, heavy arms over her chest, boring her stares into his back, trying to slither an awareness of her disapproval into his skull. Fuck them and fuck her and fuck this Dao. Only Emma matters; Emma who is strong according to her mother, strong enough. But Charles and Fram and the great line of Whiston men had believed Juliet was strong, too. Fuck them all.

They had given her over to the hands of the shed, and she didn’t even know it.

Now he sees it, a sudden leap of flame, a surge of light in the center of the city where the green would be, the signal they’ve been waiting for. The limousine doors open, people begin to clamber inside. Ray follows Emma, and is not surprised to find Amah crowding in behind him. First Amah, then others of the ancient Dag Maoudi, what Ray supposes would constitute the tribal elders, each of them doddering, hands trembling, leaning on canes. Each of them tattoo scarred, ebon eyes blazing, lips tight.

Ray and Emma sit in the back, and though there’s room beside them, the Dag Maoudi sit on the opposite side, glaring like a silent jury. Emma says nothing and peers out the window. Gathering herself the way a soldier does in the hour before a great battle, thinking death thoughts and fear thoughts and rehearsing the small pieces of the battle plan that are actually known to him. At least so Ray imagines. He doesn’t know what she’s thinking, because she doesn’t speak to him. He chooses to believe she is silent because she doesn’t want to talk openly in front of the Dag Maoudi.

He has no good reason to believe this. They’ve seen it all before. They know exactly what is going to happen next. He’s the only stranger here.

After a time, four or five minutes along the way, Amah says, “She has no awareness of you. You clutch her hand as though you would hold her, but she is not there. She is the vessel, and the mhuruk-a has filled her.”

“I promised Emma I would stay close to her.”

“The mhuruk-a does not care what promises were made. She will exercise her own will.”

Ray smiles, cold and evil. “We’ve talked already. The mhuruk-a knows she doesn’t particularly impress me.”

There is a flutter of Dag Maoudi conversation, elder whispering to elder. Ray can guess what they’re saying. Amah frowns at him, her expression stony, fierce.

“You mock what you do not understand.”

“And I think you know exactly what I understand. Don’t you?”

“You have comprehended nothing.”

“My grievous lack of knowledge must be why Freddy tried so hard to kill me. He didn’t want me to embarrass the family.”

Another flurry of hushed conversation. Ray goes on, “This is why you brought her back, isn’t it? Back from Strat in such a hurry. It had nothing to do with Juliet’s health; that was just a story you put out there for the press. Juliet has been crazy for years. But you needed Emma for the Dao. Because she’s the vessel, and she’s strong…and you didn’t have time to train anyone else to take her place. So you forced her to come back and do something she hates, to submit herself to this for family and colony and the glorious future you people are always going on about. Oh yeah, I can see why she cares so much about this fuckhole planet. You all treat her so well.”

At last, they’re silent. He doesn’t know if he stunned them, or merely made them too angry for words. Amah only shakes her head. “And what will you do, Mr. Marlowe? Will you stop the mhuruk-a from doing what it is she chooses to do? Will you pit your will against hers?”

“I’m not going to let her hurt Emma.”

And when this is done, I’m going to make certain she’s never in the position to hurt Emma again. That you can never hurt her again. I’ll take her to a place completely beyond your reach, and I’ll keep her there forever while you dry up and blow away. You and your whole world.

He wants to say these things to her, to shove his defiance in Amah’s face where she can see it and know it, drown in it. But he doesn’t, and it’s just as well. They’re out of time for vitriol. The cars decelerate on the edge of the city, and they’re no longer alone. Not just a procession of Whiston wealth and finery anymore, but streets crowded with onlookers, standing in near silence, lined up as though they’re waiting for a parade. It is a parade; a parade of one. Just Emma, teetering on the edge of possession by the mhuruk-a, by the shed.

The limousines roll to a stop, the doors open. On cue, a swarm of Eyelens cameras swoop and hover to document the glory. Emma reaches out, touches the door handle, pauses, looks back. Looks at him, and her eyes are wide, brimming with apprehension that is spiraling toward terror.

“Ray?” Ray.

And for a moment, he isn’t sure if she has spoken aloud, or directly into his mind, but he hears her, almost tastes her in that split, burning instant. She is inside him, touching his consciousness, and he is immersed in her, feels her, knows her like the unfolding of a familiar and beloved country beneath him. Her need, her fear, her exultation. She is vast and splendid; she is the scent of cinnamon and the taste of vanilla on his tongue. She is the echo of memory and place and experience that he has forgotten or never shared or only imaged with such deep and longing clarity that it is indistinguishable from truth.

Then she’s gone, and in the wake of her is darkness and emptiness. A hole in the fabric of himself.

She climbs out, leaving him to scramble after her. As she emerges, there is a cry from the audience like a cheer. Like a cheer, but something else. It is heavier, limned with hunger and savagery. There is an alien touch to it, and a feel that is brutish, mammalian, predatory. It is the mutter of lions on the edge of an African savannah watching the antlered and meat-laden herd pass by.

The cameras withdraw to a discreet distance, wide angle shots for better footage, or because their operators are still wary of Ray’s reflexes. A heartbeat of silence, then another. Emma stands in the center of the street, her head turning side to side as though she lacks orientation. Ray is aware that the Dag Maoudi, the Whiston surrogate clan, have melted into the crowd, behind the garland vines strung along the way. They are alone; he and Emma and the greedy thousands watching.

And so the Dao begins. A sound like the approach of a million starving locust, a buzz and hum, crashing through the canyon streets like a wave. A chant rolling toward them from the distance, begun a kilometer distant, taken up by the assembly–one voice, one throat, one person at a time until it grips them all.

Sha-oa con kiri ton! Mhuruk-a tala miri-ya! Kiri-ya!

Emma listens, hears, hearkens to the song. She is a being made of stone, unmoving and unmovable. Then arms rise, twine above her head; body moves, languid and supple, sinuous like a serpent. She is hips and thighs, head nodding around and eyes closed, an unconscious dervish. Gradually, the rhythm with which she began slips into harmony with the chant and stomp of the gathered crowd.

She dances for them, flinging herself in a wild and gyrating frenzy, spinning down the middle of the street. They sing, and when they reach their refrain, their frenzied Kiri-ya!, Emma cries out with them and springs into the air. As she moves, the throng follows, some along the sidewalks, some venturing into the street, some drawing up from behind until she is the center point of a vast and moving circle. Ray is drawn along with her, a short distance apart. He scans the faces around him, darker and more shadowed as the sun vanishes, sinister in the flickering lamplight.

So they move, tracking her, bodies piling along the edges, echo of chant and song deepening, thrumming, howling until it fills his head, deafens him. It’s ear-splitting and consciousness numbing all at once. The roar of ecstasy, or verging on ecstasy. They wend through the streets, along a path delineated with garlands and lanterns, pale flowers and blazes of light. The audience brings out their own lamps, their own candles, and suddenly they’re a progression of pilgrims climbing the hill toward the middle of the town and the tump of the green. And Ray is aware of a dissonance, a stumble in the chant wherever he goes, a buzz like anger in the voices. Once or twice, people reach out to him, try to grab his arms, his shoulders, pull him back. But he shakes them off, remains in Emma’s circle of protection, chasing after her.

The crowd is impossible, thousands upon thousands, a suffocating wall of breath and heat and oily sweat. In the square, between the brownstones, they pack the open spaces and trample the lawn, disperse into the buildings where they hang out the windows, congregate on the roofs, a hive of mammalian greed.

Emma leads him along the concrete berm, secure in her bubble of space, around the back of the mound and toward the sea. Here there are steps in the hill, a long climb to the crest and winged statue. Beside the statue is a great bonfire, axe-felled trunks stacked two meters tall, flames licking the night air, leaping as high as the buildings which surround.

Emma climbs and Ray follows two steps behind. She rises to the crest of the hill where in the days before she had shown him the tent and he had heard the construction of the stage. He can see the stage now, a thing of raw wood and gray stone, whole slabs of rock dredged out of the ground, stacked shoulder to shoulder, bored with runlets and holes, shallow depressions like the footprints of gods. And in the center, a square dais, narrow blocks of stone carved with symbols stained black, symbols that dance in the uneven light, shudder with meaning and depth that is almost known, but utterly impenetrable. Atop the dais is an altar of square, planed edges, looking older than the stone around it, time worn and age chewed. And beside altar is another thing, rounded at the top, tall as a man, black as volcanic stone, but reflecting the bonfire’s shimmer as though it is burnished. It is etched with rings, line upon line, rings and figures and carvings so ancient they appear as only vague suggestions on its skin.

Monolith. Plinth. Totem.

Ray sees it and almost falters, sucks in his breath. The stele from the chamber last night; the stele from his dream.

But this is not a dream. This is the flesh and bone of nightmare.

Altar and stone and Emma rising toward it, ascending the stage as the crowd gathers around, stumbles up the hill until they crowd the edges, pressing close. Ray stops at the edge, uncertain, unable to go nearer. There are too many eyes, too many hands, too much that can happen which he isn’t able to guess.

With a final, resounding Kiri-ya!, the chant ceases. There is a rustle of motion, the sense of ten thousand drawn breaths, a moment of confusion. The crowd parts, divides like a cancerous cell to create a wide swath of empty space. From this corridor emerge torches, tall like pikestaffs, clutched like shepherds’ crooks by dark Dag Maoudi. A slow procession climbs the face of the hill, laboring up slick grass to the stage, to stairs in the front, up to the altar and Emma beside it. A dozen young men, hale and strong, smiling and tense, brave before the congregation, yet exuding a palpable terror. Standing in a line, clad in short robes, white and purple, their backs to the crowd, their faces to the altar.

And leading them, Amah. Dour, fervent, stiff, Amah.

She steps away from the procession, midway between the young men and Emma. She bows deeply with her hands clasped together against her chest.

“Mhuruk-a,” she says, and the assembled audience leans in to hear her. “Great mhuruk-a, spirit, being, immensity, one to whom time and space and distance are naught, we greet you as our kind have done for generation upon generation, in welcome and in hope, seeking blessing. Seeking blessing and bringing offering, because your hunger is great, and your hunger is known to us.”

She speaks, and Emma turns her head slowly, drawn from the crowd to Amah. Even at this distance, well wide of her path of vision, Ray can feel her, the weight of her scrutiny, the terrible and flashing intensity of her gaze. His knees weaken involuntarily, and he knows that if she looked at him that way, if she focused completely on him in that moment, he would fall. He would tumble and fall and continue falling forever.

Because there is nothing of Emma in her gaze. It is pure otherness, pure mhuruk-a.

But Amah does not wither beneath her. She only averts her eyes, fixes her jaw, continues. “It is you, mhuruk-a, who brings wind and wave, tide and rain. It is you who carries the sun high into the heavens and gives strength to our limbs. It is you who makes us vital and brims us with power to do, and to will and to beat down the enemies who would beset us. You are the harmony between body and soul, man and beast, spirit and season. You moor us to the cycle of seasons and teach us when to plant, when to harvest, when to dig and when to rest. You are all things to all who are faithful. You are, and we exist, and we are one with you.”

The mhuruk-a answers in a voice that is not Emma’s, but is dry, creaking, the sound of old bones. “What is this that you bring to me?”

“Your offering, mhuruk-a. For your hunger.”

“I do not hunger for these.”

A pause, but there is no confusion in it. Amah nods confidently. “They have been tested and instructed according to the ancient ways. With them, you may share your lost communion.”

“They are not the one.”

“No, they are not the one, but they may suffice.”

Silence. The mhuruk-a waits, draws her gaze away from Amah to the offering, the milling young men. Barely a glance, then a snort of derision. She turns her head away, and the crowd utters a gasp.

At Ray’s back, someone whispers furiously, “She’s rejecting the offering!”

But she turns her head toward Ray, and not just her head, but her body follows, stepping across the stage, leaving the offering behind her. A rustle like alarm passes through the audience, watching the mhuruk-a do something they did not expect. Alarm and anticipation. To Ray, she tilts her head, curious, blinking. She comes to him, and Ray can’t move away, doesn’t want to move away. It’s Emma who approaches him; Emma in form if not in spirit, and he promised her…

…but there’s something else inside him, surrounding him, a drawing and a dawning and a quickening. He feels his heart thump slow and thunderous in his chest, and there is a new sensation that fills him. He remembers Emma, the vanilla taste of her essence, but this is not Emma. It is complete substance. It has weight and magnetism. Even as he stands there and trembles, he senses her vastness, the mhuruk-a, a place of sinew and strength, of distances beyond the comprehension of human mind, of knowledge and age and…and a taste like meat, coppery with blood, firm between the teeth and full of warmth and lust and joy. He feels her and knows her, is known by her.

“You are the one,” she says to him. “You are the one, but you are not the offering. You are known to me. You are known to the vessel. We long for you. We long to be one.”

Without understanding, Ray thinks, Yes!

“It has been long years since I have known the one.”

Yes.

“Long years since I have had communion, since I have been sated on other but table scraps.”

Yes.

“Do you know this hunger?”

He does. He feels it, welling up from a great and secret depth, a dark place in his mind, deeper than his mind, something and someplace ancient, untouched, dense and spinning like a singularity. It is place filled with the chill of space and icy, brackish water. A place of neglect and darkness, of emptiness and loneliness. The place of the outcast and the far flung. The unhomed and the robbed of habitation. Dispossession in favor of lesser beings, weakness, stolen birthright.

Ray barely breathes. His body is wracked with shivers, temblors, the shifting of sacred plates of being.

He peers into the eyes of the mhuruk-a, the ageless, the alien, and there is darkness there. Darkness and light, a faint, but brilliant spark like naked lightning. And in that light is joy and communion, knowing and being known, power and hunger and everything. The whole universe in a pinpoint of light, offered to him for possession. For habitation.

She says to him, I am and you are, and we are One. Do you will it?

Yes!

But he says, “Emma? What are you doing to me?”

Commune with me, Brother. You are known to me. You are known to us. Come and see.

And he wants to. He wants to touch the longing inside him, to feel this hunger and meet it, to share it and fill the empty space. He wants to be one.

Where he should be confused, stunned, emptied of himself and borne to the ground by the will and the weight of the shed, he knows only clarity. He has ascended to a great height, the pinnacle of a mountain, breathing air crisp and new, where the sun shines on him alone. He could step off this cliff and tumble into a golden morning, an eternal fall into light and air and the embrace of joy.

But behind him is Mikhail Brezhnaya and the twisted corpses of Ba’dai.

Kilgore and Rodriguez and Ziggy.

Becker and Sorensen and the sacrificial lamb that was Paraclete.

Micah.

The fear in John Robert’s gaze, and the horrors of the Dag Maoudi chamber.

Their breath is hot on his neck; their presence is dense and tangled; their touch is the rot and stink and grappling humidity of jungle, of flesh, of body. They promise pain and loss, struggle and failure and death. They are everything the mhuruk-a is not. They are the antithesis of communion. They are isolation and faulty knowledge. They are impotence. They are touch and sense that are meaningless. They are duality of being.

And they are Emma. Emma alone. Promise and duty and responsibility.

“What are you doing to me?” he asks again, helpless to understand.

“Commune with me,” the mhuruk-a says, and it is Emma’s voice he hears.

Her eyes flare in the dim light; her gaze pours into him like liquid fire. “For you I am vast. I am impenetrable. I am a creature of mystery. I am the earth goddess and the spirit that moves through the air. I am joy where you’ve borne sorrow. I am delight where you have known pain. I am light in your darkness, brilliance and incandescence that you alone can see. I am the secret places where you run to hide when the shadows shriek overhead. I am everything you do not yet even know that you need.”

Ray swallows, his throat thick, parched. “I don’t want you. Only Emma. Emma alone.”

Distant, through a deafening screen, there is a roar, angry, like breakers crashing against a far shore. Human voices entwined with an ancient shriek of loss.

“Faithless,” the vessel growls, jabbing a finger of accusation at him. “You are faithless and lost. Alone. Cut off from the congregation of being. Lifeless, empty, banished.”

She goes on, focusing energy, clawing at him with fire, with frenzy, with outrage. And it licks at him, touches his nerves, spirals along his limbs as though it would peel the skin from his bones. Ray remembers this part. They haven’t learned any new tricks.

He raises his hand, shows her his ring “You haven’t been paying attention. Brother learned a new lesson. You can’t touch me. And if I give the ring to Emma, you won’t be able to touch her, either.”

And he expects her to erupt, to bellow and hiss and do everything but burst into flame. But the mhuruk-a studies him, the circle of his ring. She smiles, and there is no malice in it, as though she expected it all along. A game of wits.

“You are wise and clever and worthy. If you were not clever, you would not be the one. But your knowledge is limited. I am the vessel, and the vessel is myself. To touch the infinite of contemplation is to lose us both, vessel and being. Is that what you wish?”

A vision fills his mind with perfect clarity. Him springing toward her, slipping the ring onto Emma’s finger like a token of love. A shriek of agony, Emma frozen, rigid. The shed drawn away, sucked from her like marrow from bone, caught in the ring…taking Emma with her. The essence of Emma so that only the flesh remains. And Ray is left alone, with nothing.

Amah’s words recalled to him: If it is Emma Whiston that you want, you must want her above all. Above duty and friendship, loyalty to your profession, dedication to all that has pushed you to this place and this time. You cannot have Emma and anything else. It is Emma or those other things. To love her, to cling to her, is to accept the destruction of all else that has made you who you are. The family demands it. Emma’s nature demands it.

“The nature of the vessel is to welcome the mhuruk-a. Separate the vessel from its nature, and the vessel ceases to be.” She claps her hands together and bows deeply to him. “Kiri-ya, Brother. You are worthy, but you are not yet ready. I will satisfy my hunger in other ways. Perhaps on the morrow you will show me joy.”

She strides away, and the abruptness of her withdrawal nearly drops Ray to his knees. He stumbles after her, after Emma or the mhuruk-a, he can’t tell which. As he watches, she lifts herself onto the altar, spreads her legs wide, thumbs clasps he cannot see. The assembly of New Holyoke roars their approval, and she, Emma and mhuruk-a is nude, glorious, exultant. She waves to the first young man, and he approaches, tripping over his own feet, falls into her embrace.

Ray wants to look away, to not see this. This man’s hands on Emma’s body, his erect penis splitting the front of his robe, the mhuruk-a closing about him, pulling him near, pulling him inside herself. And her cry of pleasure as she takes him. And takes him. And the crowd chanting, cheering, deafening in the background. Shouting the young man’s name in encouragement.

It only takes a few seconds, a handful of vigorous thrusts. The young man groans into her, and Emma pushes him away, his tumescence already fading. He lifts his face to her, grinning and stupid, eyes dulled. He watches her for some signal Ray does not understand. Emma spreads her knees apart, wide until the joints of her hips pop…and those nearest to her and in the front row peer and see, bend toward her. As the viscous white fluid of his ejaculate runs out of her, drips down the side of the altar.

Emma, the mhuruk-a frowns. Disappointment.

In a loud voice, she proclaims: “His seed is rejected. He is not worthy to make the communion.”

Stunned, the crowd slumps, mutters. A collective moan of grief.

The young man, rejected, dejected, lets his shoulders sag and hangs his head. Dag Maoudi take him, one on each arm, lead him off to the side. They stand him before the stele, shoulder against stone, where he raises his eyes to scan the crowd. He nods at something, someone he sees there, but his expression is impenetrable.

Then knives, a grunt like agony, blood. The people of New Holyoke howl, a sound that is part outrage, part joy.

And Ray stiffens, watching. All these people, this gathered congregation, they watch with him, and they do not protest. They welcome the sacrifice of the Dao as though they yearn for it. What he witnesses is completely beyond his comprehension.

The mhuruk-a, arms and legs spread to receive the next offering, whips her head to him. The voice that speaks into his mind is sibilant, hissing, vindictive. As cold and arid as the dark reaches of space.

This was your choice. You could have spared them this offering.

“No!”

Amah–massive, solid, ponderous–turns, points her finger at Ray. “Remove him. He has betrayed the spirit of the Dao.”

He can’t think fast enough, can’t do anything. Ray surges toward Emma. “Emma, no!”

But there are people in the way, a wall of bodies, obstructions. He lashes out with his fists, connects with jaws he hardly sees, rushes forward. They grapple with his limbs and he shouts, kicks, struggles.

Someone he does not see hits him. He staggers back, and he is struck again. A sharp blow to the back of his head with the jarring, blotting force of a brick. He’s still bellowing as his knees fold, as darkness rushes at him. Powerful hands grab him, hoist him into the air on his back, bear him away from the stage unable to move.

And over the heads of the congregation, carried aloft like an offering to the gods, he can still see her, mhuruk-a and vessel seated on the altar of sacrifice. He cries out to her with a voice that makes no sound.

The last thing he knows is Emma welcoming another candidate for communion into herself.

***

Voices.

There’s nothing inbound for another three weeks, and that’s assuming they don’t decide to alter their course in light of recent events.

Well we can’t just keep him here. We’re lucky they didn’t kill him. You’ve got to do something.

Like what, exactly? I don’t have anything with an interstellar drive.

Then you’ll just have to hide him out until something does arrive.

You’re overreacting. There’s always a frenzy during the Dao. It will pass. It always passes.

That’s the bloody problem, isn’t it? It’s so easy to overlook the madness when it’s just a few days a year.

I’m not in the mood to have this discussion again.

Ray opens his eyes. Big mistake. Light stabs at him like ice picks directly into his brain. A thermonuclear device detonates inside his skull. He rolls onto his side, shattering bones that seem to be made of glass, vomits into darkness.

He coughs, and there is just the rattle of his lungs. Nothing else seems to break.

Tries again, slowly, first one eye and then the other. He stares down into a pool of his own bile on a spot of bare wood floor. The throb in the back of his skull starts up, and he gingerly probes the spot where there seems to be the most pain. Winces. But it’s mostly a lump, matted hair, only a little hot and sticky blood still seeping out.

You should have given him a more detailed briefing.

How could I have guessed he was going to do something like this? And it isn’t like he’s one of mine. I have no control over him.

How could you not have guessed? Use your brain, man! It’s obvious that he can’t keep away from her.

You’d think she would have warned him.

And how would you have handled that if you were her, eh? ‘Oh, darling, by the way, once a year I have to fuck a bunch of strange men on a public stage, and those who don’t make the grade are sacrificed in the name of community spirit or fertility blessings or some other lunatic explanation. I don’t properly understand it, of course, but we’ve done it for so long, it hardly seems appropriate to start rocking the boat now.’

We should have put a stop to this a long time ago.

Onto his back again, blinking at the ceiling, at the dim lamp beside the bed, the faded paper on the walls. To his left is a door hanging ajar, and beyond it a hallway that appears just as worn and dingy as the room itself. A room stacked with yellowed paper, folded newspapers, dirty dishes.

His mouth tastes like vomit, sour and hot. Bile and ash. Head full of gauze, packed tight and desiccated, like an Egyptian mummy tastefully seasoned with about a ton of sand and a thousand years of baking sun.

He’s not going to be able to accomplish anything, not after this. No one is going to help him.

You’re helping him. I’m helping him. We can’t be the only two sane people on this planet.

If you don’t find a way to get him home, he’s a dead man. I can promise you that.

I told you: three weeks at the minimum. There’s nothing else I can do.

He’s up, on his feet, using the wall for support. The room spins about him, but it’s a slow, leisurely spin. One he can negotiate if he concentrates. He sets attainable goals. Two steps to the door, hugging the wall of the hallway, trying not to do anything clumsy like knocking the picture frames awry.

Finally, the end of the corridor. Thomas Malcolm and Colonel Ritchie in the front room of Malcolm’s living space. Ray recognizes it. He was here, what, yesterday, seated on the chair where Ritchie is sitting now. The memory is hazy. He doesn’t remember what he and Malcolm were talking about.

“I’m not going anywhere,” he croaks at them.

Then falls flat on his face. A few seconds of missing time. Feels like seconds, could be hours, but when he’s conscious again, his cheek and the back of his head ache. His neck is sore too, but that seems to be mostly because it’s lolling his head at a terrible angle against the back of the couch. And the rest of his face is numb, because they’ve packed ice against his jaw, beneath his skull, over the bridge of his nose.

He says, “Ugh.”

“Stubborn fool,” Malcolm responds, studying him over the edge of the ice pack that obscures Ray’s vision. “You should have stayed in bed.”

“I have work to do.”

“Oh, like inciting another public riot? It took the full planetside EED force to get you away from the last group of your fans.”

“That’s not saying much,” Ray points out.

“You must be feeling better. You think you’re funny again.”

“You called out the troops?” Ray lifts his head so he can face them.

“Of course. I couldn’t very well let them haul you off and murder you in the street. We have enough of that during the Dao without adding to the body count.”

Ray remembers. It’s like poking at a fresh wound with a needle. “They killed him.”

Malcolm shakes his head like someone who’s trying to explain basic concepts of advanced physics to a hedgehog. “You should have done your homework before plunging in, Commander Marlowe.” He glances back over his shoulder to Ritchie. “I told you, he doesn’t know anything. You should have briefed him in more detail.”

“I don’t understand,” Ray says. “The Dag Maoudi…they murdered him and the people just watched. They wanted it to happen. They anticipated it.”

Malcolm places his hand gently on Ray’s shoulder. “Welcome to New Holyoke.”

“You just let it happen. All of you.”

It’s Ritchie that looks away, but he says nothing.

Ray goes on, feeling outraged, feeling emptied. “Is this what you meant when you said you tried not to interfere with colonial affairs, Colonel?”

“What would you have me do, Marlowe? Tell me that. The Dao had been established long before I took command of this outpost. And what if I did complain up the chain of command, eh? Who would believe me? If they sent me more troops–which is highly unlikely, and you know it–who would I go after? Who would speak out against the Whistons? Anything I did would look like the EED directing military pressure against the Whiston family because of their proprietary charter, plain and simple.”

“Excuses,” Ray snaps. He rounds on Malcolm quickly enough to make his throbbing head spin. “And what about you? You don’t care either? Even though you know it isn’t just the Dao? You know they’re murdering the Trust children, too. Just like Martin Schmidt. To feed the mhuruk-a.”

“And what would you have done? Stopped it somehow?” Malcolm says softly, neither angry nor defensive. “As long as there has been a New Holyoke, there has been a Dao. As long as there has been a female vessel, there have been public sacrifices of the unworthy. Can’t very well have all these men who have been sticking their reproductive bits into your wife or daughter hanging about to brag of their conquest.”

It’s unfathomable. The expressions on the faces in the crowd. Neither shock nor surprise, just a sort of savage glee.

“It’s not that simple,” Ray rasps around the ache in his head. “It isn’t what you think it is, and it isn’t just about social manipulation. Malcolm, they’re murdering people in the public square! Why hasn’t anyone stopped them?”

“Because the people want it, Ray. The Whistons want it. Oh, it’s not so bad as it seems on the surface, I suppose. Shocking, yes, if you haven’t been adequately prepared.” Malcolm stabs an accusatory glare at Colonel Ritchie, but continues without a pause. “The candidates were volunteers, applicants who would take the great risk of being rejected rather than miss the opportunity to be elevated by the mhuruk-a. To be the one to father a Dao child, with all the social benefits and financial considerations that follow–that is an awfully tempting offer to just reject out of hand. There has been no shortage of applicants, believe me.”

There’s a coarse, gratuitous mockery in Malcolm’s tone. Sarcasm so tired he doesn’t even realize he’s doing it. “This is the way they negotiate the balance of power on New Holyoke, Ray. On the first night, the community puts forth the young men they have chosen, the ones the people deem worthy for inclusion among the pantheon of the powerful. The ones they want to be the next media moguls, the next Forum representatives, the next directors of Whelemat.”

“And then they watch while the Dag Maoudi kill them,” Ray says, flat and angry. Because the shed demands blood. The blood of martyrs.

“It is the way things have always been done.”

And Ray understands, even if Malcolm and Ritchie do not. They don’t carry the knowledge he does about the nature of the shed. They do not share his context. How much influence could a shed exert given a constant diet of blood sacrifice? How many minds would it have to change, control, bend to make something like the egregious bloodshed of the Dao sensical? So much power. It is beyond his comprehension.

“It has to stop.”

Malcolm only shrugs. “Perhaps one day it will. Emma has done her part to see that it does, you might say. She has never found them worthy. In the old days, when I was a child and Juliet was the vessel, there were more selections. She bore the children of a great many men, and she accepted the seed of others. It gave the people hope, a sense of vibrancy. But Emma is different. She has changed everything. The candidates chosen by the community have rarely been accepted. The candidates she chooses herself, as she will do tomorrow night…well, they call out to her and she rarely hears them. It’s never the eight or ten or twelve that her mother used to take, but one or two. Last Dao, she wandered the streets of the city all night long without accepting anyone. Thus, some say that the Dao is failing, that Emma’s unwillingness to choose will turn people away from tolerating it.”

Ray leans forward, elbows on his knees. He buries his face in his hands. Malcolm squeezes his shoulder again. “I know this must be hard for you to accept. But it simply is, Ray, as entrenched in the public consciousness as Terran Forum elections or the necessity of organized religion to mediate between man and God. There are always people willing to take great risks for fame and glory. On New Holyoke, if you cannot be a Dao child, the next best position is that of a Dao parent. And once or twice in a generation, there is the grandest opportunity of all–the chance to be grafted into the Whiston clan itself. For a chance at that future, many are willing to sacrifice themselves. You, of course, have thrown a wrench into the whole process. You have exacerbated the uneasiness about the whole legitimacy of the Dao, because you were the one that Emma was going to choose. She had finally selected an heir.”

“Not Emma,” Ray growls back.

Malcolm waves his hand impatiently. “Whatever. Why do you think the crowd was so angry with you? The colony has been waiting nearly four years for the selection of Emma’s mate, practically from the day she came of age and assumed her role as the vessel. You were chosen, and you rejected her. You rejected the assurance of the colony’s future well being by condemning the Dao as an illegitimate transaction between the people and the Whistons. You turned your back on all the blood that has been shed in the name of the Dao. People don’t want to think they’ve been wrong.”

“There’s so much you don’t understand,” Ray says quietly. “Why would they want to be controlled by the mhuruk-a?”

“There is no mhuruk-a, Ray. It is fantasy, illusion, religious trapping. Certainly, some people believe, the same way some people are Presbyterians or Catholics or Muslims, but not all of us. We recognize the Dao for what it is: social engineering. That’s what it is, what it’s always been. It is the great Whiston experiment. The Dao is a public seal of approval for certain elements and individuals whom the Whiston family decides are most beneficial to the colony’s future, and the chance to legitimately remove those who might be perceived as a threat to Whiston control. They learned the technique from the Dag Maoudi long ago and put it into practice here on New Holyoke where no one could speak out against them. It’s how they maintain power.

“The people of New Holyoke maintain the illusion of belief because the power the Whistons do have has never been more precariously held. Since Fram passed and left us with Charles, and since Charles could leave us no better hope than Frederick, the family has slowly faltered. All that stands between this colony and the departure of the Whiston largesse is Emma’s womb. If she will not provide a Whiston heir, New Holyoke’s days are numbered.”

“You don’t believe in the mhuruk-a.” How can he warn them if they don’t believe in the shed?

“Of course not.”

“Emma believes. So do the Dag Maoudi.”

Malcolm snorts. “Does it really matter what they believe?”

And it’s too late to begin explaining such things. He focuses has attention on Colonel Ritchie. “Have you located Frederick Whiston?”

Ritchie appears relieved to have the Dao trajectory of the conversation over with. “Not yet, but we’re still looking.”

It doesn’t matter. “Do you have a car? I need to get back to the Grange.”

“I don’t think that’s such a good idea, Ray.”

“Why? You think they’ll try to kill me? I’m the chosen one, remember?”

“You’re the chosen one who has just made it abundantly clear that you don’t place much value on their traditions, Marlowe. I know you want to get back to work, but what do you think you can accomplish? You have no cover left, you have no standing with the community. You’re moving in completely hostile territory from this moment forward.”

“On the contrary, Colonel. I’m only about a dozen bullets from wrapping up my mission and alleviating you of this nasty command albatross of the Dao.”

Malcolm: “You’re not going to save her, you know, no matter how badly she might want to be saved. She’s a Whiston. There’s no escaping that destiny.”

Ray levers himself to his feet. “I don’t believe in destiny.”

Malcolm sighs. “Did you talk to Juliet like I told you?”

“Yes.”

“And what did she tell you? Did she go on about how she didn’t want to be the chosen one either? About how she believed they wouldn’t harm her? How one day she was a bright a precocious young woman and the next she was mad, twisted, Whiston thew and bone? Did she?”

He changed my mind.

“I know what happened to her. This is different.”

“They’ll destroy you if you go back there, just like they destroyed her. Don’t you think she believed that she could change things also, that she could stop the Dao?”

She didn’t know what I know, Ray thinks. She wasn’t able to protect herself from the shed. She didn’t have–

The ring. Bane of the shed, symbol of Solomon, infinite of contemplation.

He looks at his finger. Bare, empty, unprotected. For a moment, all he can do is gape.

But he’s just like Emma, naked to harm. Emma, who he promised to protect above all.

Ray climbs to his feet, unsteady, ready to topple. “I’m going back. Now.”

Ritchie rises, spreads his arms as if he’s going to stop him. “Ray, come on.”

But he’s done with reason, done with excuses. “You should have stopped this a long time ago, Colonel. I’m just cleaning up your mess.”

It’s completely unfair. Ray knows all the excuses: the small outpost, the power of the Whistons, the fact that the community doesn’t just tolerate it, but participates. And the shed, the astounding power and influence of the shed. But the accusation is enough; it stuns Ritchie long enough for Ray to get past him and to the top of the stairs.

With a curse and a shrug, Ritchie follows him out the door.

Over his shoulder, all the way down the stairs, he can hear Malcolm shouting after him. “You’re not going to save her, Marlowe! She’s a Whiston! She doesn’t want to be saved!”

***

She returns after midnight, plodding up the stairs of her Faery Tower with a slow and steady gait. She opens the door to her private chambers, here at the very top, but does not bother with the lights, because the candles in the windows are sufficient. And he can see her for a moment, a creature of shadow, thin shoulders drooped, gown in disarray, silhouetted in the golden light from the landing. She hesitates there, leaning her full weight against the knob and the door, and he can hear her breathing, shallow and tinged with weariness. Mournful, as though she’s been sobbing for hours. And he can smell her as well, not the clean vanilla scent he has come to know as hers, as her own personal aroma, but something else. Sweat, sex, a vaguely rotten and decadent tang.

He wants to speak to her in this moment, to comfort her, but he waits. Waits.

Emma moves inside and closes the door behind her. She navigates the darkness with practiced ease, following wispy trails of moonlight filtering through the windows and the guttering uncertainty of the candles, a path of silver and gold. The argent moonlight is so much like the Terran moon, almost indistinguishable, really. New Holyoke is like another Earth. Raw and fertile, teeming with life and abundance and hope. So alike, but Ray senses only the distance, the difference.

She stops near him, hardly three meters away from where he sits in the chair next to the door to her bed chamber. He’s been here for hours, it seems, watching the lights of Blackheath Grange glimmer beneath the cool seaside breezes. Watching the great bonfire on the green gutter, shrink to embers, fade to black.

“I can smell you,” she says quietly. “You smell like blood.”

“You smell like–”

“Don’t. Please, Ray. Just don’t.”

He sighs. “I’m sorry. That was unfair of me. I didn’t come here to hurt you.” You’ve been hurt enough.

“Are you all right? Are you…they wouldn’t tell me where you’d gone.”

“I needed to know that you were okay, but I thought, well, I thought that it might not be you when you came back here.” He laughs at his own failure to communicate. There’s too much to process; too many things have happened. “I just needed to see you. It is you, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“And the mhuruk-a?”

Emma shrugs, uncaring. “She withdraws when she’s been sated. For a time, at least. Usually long enough to let me sleep, to get ready for tomorrow.”

Sated. What an ugly, vicious, hateful word. “Emma, I’m trying–”

But she jerks her head away as though she doesn’t want to hear him. “Did they hurt you?”

“I’m fine. I fared better than others.” He should stop there, before he says something he will regret, but can’t seem to let it go. “Tell me how to make sense of what I saw, Emma. Explain what happened in a way that won’t make me want to vomit every time I think about it.”

“It was the Dao. The way it’s always been. For as long as I can remember.”

“And no one ever complains? They just line up like lambs waiting for the slaughter?”

“They know the risk. Those who participate in the Dao know what can happen if they’re rejected by the mhuruk-a. Most of them want that chance, the approval, the possibility…”

Ray nods. “They want to be the one.”

“Yes, they do. They want to be Whiston, and failing that, they want to ascend to power. Perhaps not the one, but still chosen. Some years, as many as half are taken.”

“And how many of them did you reject this time?”

“Not me, Ray. It’s not me.”

You could have spared them this offering.

“How many?”

Rasping, defeated. “All of them.”

Ray hears, grunts. “Because the mhuruk-a was angry.”

“She didn’t want them. They weren’t the one.”

“And you? Was it good for you?”

“That’s not fair, Ray. You don’t know what it’s like to be the vessel. It isn’t like that, not dirty. Not just fucking–you said that, and you were right. I know them like she knows them. When we join, I mean. It isn’t just fucking. It’s feeling, knowing, being. The mhuruk-a measures them and what she finds is shown to me. There’s a depth, an understanding, a…you can’t understand.”

“But I do, Emma. I’ve known you that way. Just you.”

She withdraws from him, lowering her head in the darkness. There’s nothing he can say that doesn’t hurt her, it seems. “While they’re inside me, Ray, I can feel what the mhuruk-a is thinking. Even before they release, I know what’s going to happen. Who is to be chosen, and who is to be rejected. Do you think that’s easy for me, to know?”

“And tonight? You knew she was going to reject them all?”

“After you’d spurned her, yes.”

“You should have stopped it, Emma.” He says it almost as an accusation. He’s out of sorts even after the hours spent alone, completely without equilibrium. In his mind’s eye, he keeps seeing her opening her arms and thighs and naked desire to strangers. Strangers doomed to die. “You should have made them stop.”

She recoils from him, as though she can sense what he’s thinking. It probably isn’t hard. “I didn’t have a choice. I’m just the vessel. Do you think I want this?”

“I don’t know what you want.”

Quietly, almost a whisper: “I want you.”

“Like the mhuruk-a? Is that what you mean? Because I’m the one, because I’m strong, because there’s something inside me that is useful to the Whiston cause?”

“Ray!” She barks his name, outraged. He’s hurt her in ways he doesn’t even understand.

But she, too, does not understand. He’s only told her about Frederick, how Frederick killed Micah, how Frederick destroyed Paraclete to keep from being caught. He hasn’t told her about the stolen Solomonic ring, how it came to New Holyoke, how the Dag Maoudi have spent years murdering the children of the Trust to summon shed for the Dao, to exert control over the entire world. He hasn’t told her about all the blood that has been spilled to make her the vessel, just as her mother was.

How can he save her if she doesn’t understand what he’s saving her from?

For several moments, he sits and breathes, orienting himself in this strange new terrain. Then, as gently as he is able, he says: “Tell me, Emma. Tell me you don’t care what the mhuruk-a wants. Tell me you don’t care that I’m supposed to be the one.”

“Yes! It’s true, all of it. Just you.”

“And tell me you’ll come away with me. Anywhere but here. Run away with me.”

“Now, yes. I love you, Ray. I’ll do anything you want me to do. Just–”

“Just what?”

“Stop speaking to me like I disgust you. Please. I hate this; I hate everything about it. Believe me, in me.”

Save me. It’s there, without her speaking it, as plaintive as a wail. And he responds to it, her need, her desire. He doesn’t think anymore, doesn’t care, just acts. Ray is exhausted with caring about tragedies he cannot prevent. He rises from the chair, meets her in the darkness, covers her in his embrace. She clings to him, warm and soft and desperate. They touch. Finger to finger, hand to face, lips pressed together. Her flesh burns like the naked heat of a furnace, molten and radiant.

“There are things I haven’t told you,” he whispers into her ear. “Vital things.”

But she touches her finger to his lips. “Hush.”

“Emma, please.”

“Not here. Come with me.”

“Come with you?” He looks down at her quizzically.

And she springs away, exploiting his confusion, hiking her gown up above her knees. She dashes off, a kestrel wind.

He follows, chasing after her. Breakneck down the shaft of her tower, pursuing her, taunted by laughter light and tinkling like glass. Through the piazza, with their feet slapping against stone and echoes careening off the dour stone walls of the manor. Plunging into the house, through a wide hall, grand in appearance, then outside again. Rolling down the back slope on dew slickened grass, past the charred remains of the cottage. She is quick, lithe, a darting rabbit in a sylvan wonderland, always beyond his grasp.

He clutches at her as though she is moonbeam and shadow, his hands always returning empty.

On and on, to wall and gate and secret garden, bursting through into bowers clotted with night. More slowly, stepping off the path, ducking low slung branches and willowy saplings strangled of sunlight and nutrients by the towering, majestic oak and sycamore and winter maple.

And at last collapsing into a sea of soft petals and black stems, flowers that would be purple and pink, pale yellow daffodils and brilliant morning glory. He catches her at last, tumbles over her, bears her to the ground. She is still laughing, smiling, her eyes dancing in the light of the moon.

“Take me away,” she says, happily, after she has caught her breath. “Promise that you’ll take me away, just like you said.”

“I will.”

“Anywhere I want to go?”

“Yes.”

“And you’ll stay with me? You’ll stay and you’ll love me always?”

“Always.”

This time he does not stop. Later, there will be opportunity for justice, for vengeance, for all the things he must do. Now, there is Emma, Emma who has chosen him, who has begged him to take her, love her, save her from all that she has ever known. He thinks of nothing but her, firm and soft, precious and willing. Her arms around his neck, her lips against him. He splits the fabric of her gown along its hidden clasps, just as he saw her do before. He is rough, peeling it away like a dark and loathsome skin. There is a tangle of moments, of frenzy as he wrestles with his own clothes, making himself as vulnerable and naked as she is, hating the seconds as they pass.

She is wet, steaming, sultry.

Still damp inside with the rejected seed of dead men.

And he doesn’t care. Doesn’t care at all.

Because when he enters her, she catches her breath and her body ripples with a tension of muscle and anticipation that is pure joy and pleasure and acceptance. She cries out his name, over and over again. She presses her body against him, and knows that it is him, Ray, who she is taking. It is him that she wants above all. His hunger and hers are all that matters, and everything else passes away.

And when he finally releases, it is her mouth pressed against his, eyes closed, consumed by a darkness that is velvet soft and fine like sand, and a depth utterly without end. He could fall into her night forever, completely lost, completely whole.

For a pure, blinding instant, he thinks of all the things he should say to her. That he loves her. That from the beginning he’s been trying to protect her. That he understands this thing, this Dao. That he’s been equipped to understand from the beginning because of Ba’dai. That none of this is her fault, even though he has acted at times as though it was. That nothing else matters, not shed or murder, Lilaikens or rings, Whistons or duty, just her and him and the joy of their joining.

Frederick and his Lilaiken conspiracy can go screw themselves.

He doesn’t care about Paraclete, about shed, about peril beyond his comprehension.

New Holyoke and all of frontier space can go to hell.

None of it matters. He’ll turn his back on everything for her. He was made for her.

After an eternity of knowing her, feeling her, he lifts himself up, rolls of to the side. Crushes flowers beneath his weight. Finally, Ray opens his eyes.

Frederick Whiston, watching from the edges, says to him, “Now you’ve done it, fool.”

***

The last thing that happens before a grim faced sergeant points you into the vicinity of combat, of a legitimate kill zone, is a whole bunch of screaming. Generally it’s screaming over chopper blades, or over the descent rumble of combat drop ship, but it’s carefully enunciated screaming nonetheless. Sergeants take classes in this sort of thing–how to scream clearly and use correct military diction while doing it. They lead you through a whole pantomime of slapping and clacking, patting the body and the load harness in a way vaguely reminiscent of elementary school gym class.

It inevitably starts Boots! Stomp. Stomp.

Tac Helmet, visor down! Slap, pull, click.

Tac Display up!

M-44 Assault Weapon locked! Clack, clatter of the cartridge advance, snip of the safety on.

Extra cartridge ration! Slap, slap, slap, all over the load harness.

And so on, from bottom to top, a final inventory of all the tactical equipment a modern soldier requires to avoid ending up on the casualty list.

These are the things Ray is thinking at this moment, running through his inventory, a pointless exercise, irony at work. Because he has none of these things, tools of his trade for as long as he can remember. He’s wandered into a kill zone without even a trench knife to back him up.

He scrambles to his feet, stands there in the darkness, naked, facing Frederick Whiston. There isn’t even a tree within easy reach to lend him a hefty limb he might forge into a blunt edged weapon. All he can do is stand, glower, clench his fists.

Frederick, on the other hand, came more than prepared, in dark clothes of the type typically used by men interested in sneaking about through dark spaces. And weapon in hand. Just a small piece, matte finished so the moon barely glances off its edges, but the small ones always look the most wicked when they’re pointed at you because they convey the message that this is going to be personal. Not a blustery, barking gun like Marines carry, absolutely impersonal guns for which one target is as good as another, as long as they knock somebody down. Small weapons say: I’m going to kill you. You. I’m going to spit metal into your vulnerable flesh, and I’m going to hang around and wait until I’m sure you’ve expired before moving on to the next victim.

So he does the best he can, moving slowly, always watching the hand and the gun, trying not to hyperventilate. Trying to place himself between Emma and the likely vector of any projectiles that might come out of the barrel.

Frederick steps from the screen of foliage and into the bower, snapping twigs beneath his feet, crushing the heads of late blooming flowers. He trains the gun on them.

“I think that’s far enough, Marlowe. My sister is more than capable of helping herself up. After all, she’s been rising up off her back for years.”

She does rise, stands beside Ray. She pulls her shoulders back, pale and defiant. “I knew you’d be back, Frederick. You’re too weak to make it on your own. Just a coward; always the coward.”

Let’s not antagonize the gun-wielding madman, Ray thinks, but Frederick Whiston only laughs. “Yes, dear Emma, I’m the weak one. I’m the coward. That’s the way it’s always been, hasn’t it? Because I wasn’t the vessel. Too much of our father’s tainted blood in me.” He edges nearer, close enough that Ray can see his face, read his expression, but in the shadows, his eyes are empty, blank, dark holes punched in the alabaster mask of his face. Still too far away for Ray to do anything. “It is Emma, isn’t it? Not the great mhuruk-a? Bringer of life, spirit of place, bitch of fortune and favor. I’m sorry, that probably isn’t the proper invocation. I’ve forgotten the words; it’s been so long since my Dao with you. Wait, that’s right, I never had a Dao fuck, did I? Ours were all extra-curricular. Even in those days, I was judged the weak link in the Whiston chain.”

“Stop it, Frederick!”

“I think it’s a little late for you to be keeping secrets now, Emma. You have what you wanted. Despite my best efforts, you won again. I’m sorry, that’s probably crass of me, but I couldn’t help but overhear the cries of your victory. What do you think, Marlowe, now that you’ve tasted the forbidden fruit? She fucks well, my sister. She’s had enough practice.”

“What do you want?” Ray demands, cognizant of the gun, trying to sound reasonable.

Frederick Whiston grins at him, a man who has gone just a little crazy. “Well, I had come back with the intention of killing you.”

“Then let Emma go back to the house, and we can settle this between us.”

Another laugh, and Ray realizes there’s actually no note of madness in it. None at all, in fact. Just determination, savagery and a grim sense of despair. “You know, I really do admire you, Commander. I have from the beginning. Your sense of purpose, your courage, your rectitude. It never was personal, this thing between us.”

“Don’t make it personal now. Let Emma leave.”

“You see? I even admire that about you. All of the blundering attempts I’ve made on your life, and it’s still not your own skin that you worry about. It’s all about Emma, about the innocent, about protecting others from harm. You should have listened to me at dinner, Marlowe. I tried to warn you then.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I said it was for your own good. But you didn’t believe. Even after last night, after the terrible things you witnessed in the cellar chamber, you did not believe.” Frederick manages to look sincerely disappointed. “You’ve spoken with our mother by now, I assume.”

“Yes.”

“And still you didn’t put it together? Ah, I suppose it was optimistic of me to assume that mother would remain coherent long enough to give you an adequate explanation. But that’s your one great shortcoming, isn’t it? You’re really not very well suited to your current employment, at least not to the investigative end of it. You’d rather bumble about shooting people and breaking things.

“Oh, wait a moment, that’s right! Those sorts of things are supposed to be secrets, aren’t they? Commander Ray Marlowe, lately Gunny Sergeant Ray Marlowe, agent of the Criminal Investigations Unit assigned to the Goliath class cruiser Paraclete to interdict possible Lilaiken violence. Formerly of the Ninth Army Desert Force Marines stationed in the New Mes combat zone. Three times cited for valor in combat. Koihu, Deben Zah, Tehran. You led the charge up Wehir Taud ridge outside Vahi that salvaged the near debacle that was General Macore’s southern peninsula campaign and opened the gates to Baghdad. And truth be told, you were probably under-recognized. At Keh, you killed thirty-four men, you personally, according to the mission reconstruction files. A flesh and blood war hero is what you are.” Frederick stops there, grinning like a skull, relishing his recitation of secrets.

And Ray, Ray has been holding his breath, making himself dizzy, tasting blood. Even he has tried to forget about Keh, one of those botched hotshot lieutenant escort missions, buried beneath millions of documents, thousands of reports, denied and ignored and disastrous. Keh, which was supposed to be a Russoturk training ground for special mission bio-warfare troops trained to infiltrate the West, infect water supplies, poison lakes and streams. Keh, the intelligence said. Except it wasn’t Keh. It was Kah, three hundred kilometers to the north and west. Keh was just another Russoturk village tucked inside the border of old Syria. An intelligence failure, a poorly translated communiqué intercepted from enemy satellites, an error compounded, a human rights atrocity.

It is impossible that Frederick Whiston could know these things.

But he isn’t done. “And then…and then Ba’dai. After Ba’dai, you vanished. From the official record, at least. Will you tell me what occurred there, Marlowe? Or would you like me to tell you?”

Ray can’t say anything at all.

“You see,” Frederick says, “we haven’t been exactly forthcoming with you, either. Not from the very beginning. Isn’t that right, Emma?”

“No.” Her voice is weary, quiet. “Stop, Frederick. Please.”

“Do you hear that? She’s begging me, Marlowe. She’s begging me to spare you from knowledge. You’re flattered. It’s true love, you think, for her to want to save you from this pain. She’s always been clever that way, at deception. Myself, I don’t mind inflicting a little pain in the name of truth. You’d rather have the truth than a pleasant delusion, wouldn’t you? I think you would.”

We?

The word strikes his mind like a flinch. We?

“Emma?” he says in a voice that sounds like pleading.

She looks away. “It isn’t like that, Ray.”

“It isn’t like that, Ray,” Frederick mimics, sarcastic. “Of course it’s like that. We lied to you with at least the depth, aplomb and frequency with which you thought you were lying to us. Can you believe her now? Which side of the truth, which spin on it, will she give you this time?”

“He’s insane, Ray. Don’t listen to him.”

Frederick spins the gun toward her, frowning. “Now, Emma, up to this point, I had refrained from making personal attacks. You’ve put me in a position where I have a moral obligation to defend myself and my honor.”

“Frederick,” she says stiffly, her tone pregnant with threats. Like she’s scolding a child. “Do not do this.”

He ignores her. “I wonder, Marlowe, has she told you why she fled our idyllic colonial estate for the fast life of Stratiskaya Daransk? I’m certain she has. Probably something to do with the Dao, yes? The terrible strain of the Dao. It broke our mother, you know. Because she wasn’t pure enough; because she was a means to an end rather than a true vessel.”

Ray hears her, Juliet Whiston, inside his head. He changed my mind. But instead of outrage, all he feels is the sudden pressure of ominous revelation rising in his throat. Suffocating.

Frederick is done laughing, mocking them. The gravity of his demeanor only makes it worse. “You know it’s all lies, don’t you? Everything you’ve been told about the Dao is a lie.”

“I know about the mhuruk-a,” Ray responds. I know about the shed.

“Yes, you met one of them at Ba’dai, under different circumstances. The first time, at least. But that Dao, so barbaric, so primal, tricky to understand, really. It’s interesting as a cultural artifact. We’ve been practicing it for years, for whole centuries together, my family. We learned it from the Dag Maoudi, of course, as we learned so many other things. They taught us to touch the mhuruk-a, to draw upon her essence, to feed on her. To give her offerings of blood that would sate her hunger, keep her fat and willing and bound to us through rites so ancient their source has been forgotten. She who resides within the Stone. In return, she made us powerful, destroyed our enemies, just as she had once done for the Dag Maoudi before they became weak. That’s why she was brought to us. Stolen by elements who wanted to revive the old ways, who had vision beyond a simple island.

“What the Dag Maoudi were, we attempted to become, at least for a time, before we too became fat, indolent. Poor stewards of the Stone. What do you think of the Dao now that you’ve seen it, Mr. Marlowe?”

“I think it’s a lousy way to control your population,” Ray says, slow and careful. He suspects it is what Frederick wants to hear. “And an even more screwed up way to abuse your children.”

“Then you’ve missed the entire point. You’ve mistaken the trappings and rites for meaning, shadows for substance. That’s what you get when you go to the disgruntled tabloid muckrakers for information. For all of the anonymous Trust children murdered, all of the Dao sacrifices to the insatiable mouth of the mhuruk-a, it has never been just about the shedding of blood.”

Frederick bares his teeth. Not a smile, but something feral. “What you’ve been told is that the Dao exists in order for us to channel the mhuruk-a, the daemon, the ancient spirit of the Dag Maoudi Stone. In channeling the mhuruk-a, we bind the community together, both to one to another, and the collective to ourselves. But it wears on the vessel, this bottling of the eternal and the sublime in human form. Is any of this sounding familiar to you?”

“What sounds familiar is the part where you let this stupidity ruin your mother’s life, and now you’ll do the same to Emma unless someone stops you.”

“Yes, yes. That’s exactly what you were made to believe. And it’s true, after a fashion, I suppose. But only in part. The rest of the story is about us, our family, the long years of neglect and failure. How we bred ourselves carelessly, and not in the ways instructed by the Dag Maoudi. How we neglected the duties that were expected of us, so that the spirit departed from us–at least, as far as the Stone would allow. How with each year that passed, each taint added to the bloodline, the touch of the mhuruk-a became more distant, more difficult, so that there was no communion.”

Frederick fixes him with a stern expression, the hooded glare of a predator stalking through tall grass. “Where there is no communion with the mhuruk-a, other rites must be brought to bear. She is mighty, Marlowe. You know this as well as we do. Her power to build, influence, destroy is beyond comprehension. The Whiston empire was built on the strong back of the mhuruk-a of the Dag Maoudi. It was founded on the true purpose of the Dao.

“These are difficult things to explain, you see? There is a sprawling gulf between the past and the present. In out time, for all the gifts the spirit gives, it takes its bounty in return. Not only in blood, as you have seen, but also in strength from the vessel, if the vessel is weak. Humanity is not constructed to suffer possession lightly, and our mother was weak, faulty, poorly built. Father and the Dag Maoudi recognized her raw potential, but they had to make her strong enough if she was to be the vessel they intended. There were surgeries, drugs, rites and rituals both modern and ancient designed to simulate the chemistry that was lacking. They had to shape her mind to bear the unbearable, in the hope that he would pass to her, this modified vessel, the remnant of the Whiston glory. Alas, his firstborn, his only son, was an imperfect creation. So he tried harder with his daughter.

“He realized that it was not just the vessel that was flawed, but himself as well. The true Whiston essence was too many generations removed, too diluted. So there were physicians, genetic specialists, trained in the arts and lore of the Dag Maoudi, and they tampered and spliced, made the necessary adjustments, reversed the damage wrought by all those generations of imperfect breeding in his very genetic structure. It was too much. He couldn’t endure the testing, and it destroyed him. But before he was lost, he succeeded in part. He suffered the mhuruk-a as a vessel. A truly horrid and abominable vessel, indeed. Cracked and misshapen, his flesh bulbous and running with sores from radiation, his cells wracked by mutation. Monstrous, he mounted our mother during the Dao; monstrous, he summoned glory; monstrous, he channeled all our lost might into his seed.

“And together they made Emma in the image of her forbearers. Mother’s genetic raw materials coupled with father’s, all the impurities and faulty, diluted genetic tags removed. Together they made the perfect vessel, attuned to the will and way of the mhuruk-a. Emma was supposed to be the pinnacle of Whiston accomplishment. A pure vessel, yes, but not only for communication as others had been, but one who hearkened back to the distant past, to the ancient Dag Maoudi, who could commune and harness the might of the mhuruk-a without the shedding of blood.”

“And yet you kept on killing,” Ray says, almost growling.

“We have forgotten much. Not just we, but the Dag Maoudi who taught us, who once embraced the mhuruk-a as genius, guide, mother. They had counted themselves as surrogates to the eternal because they had learned to construct themselves naturally–through genetic selection, mating vessel to Dao offspring, mind to like mind–until their whole race echoed the being and thought and will of the spirit. Until they bound the mhuruk-a to themselves, and themselves to the Stone, so that it made them strong.

“Amah will tell you that in those ancient days, they walked in the darkness of the spirit and knew no fear. But even by the time our great ancestors discovered the Dag Maoudi, that glory had all passed away. They were a people in decline, who clung to their gods, trapped them in stone, manipulated them with ritual and blood. The glory that was transferred to the Whistons in those days was the nadir of the Dag Maoudi, after they had already begun to forget. They taught us to shape our minds, to recognize the signs of other minds like our own, to mate in ways that would make us strong, like the Dag Maoudi had been. The process was long, arduous, ultimately flawed. We could never rise above the need for blood.

“Grandfather Fram saw the truth, after the Whiston Corporation was wrested from his control. He saw that we had become weak, and that the only way to reverse that course was to begin again in a new place, following the old ways as well as they could be remembered. A world of our own, where we could become great once more, without interference. Our father believed he had accomplished what his father had not, that he had made the perfect vessel. But he was wrong. The vessel alone does not suffice. Even the perfect vessel does not commune.

“My sister would have you believe that she ran off because she didn’t want to go mad. She didn’t want to be destroyed as our mother was destroyed. That was her first lie, Marlowe. She is the perfect vessel, in form and mind, immune to the depredations of the mhuruk-a. She went to Stratiskaya Daransk because she was told to go. Because the mhuruk-a said that you would be there, and because she whispered to the Dag Maoudi that you are the one.”

Frederick wants to go on, Ray can feel it, his vicious glee, but Emma stops him. She shakes her head, hard like a shout of denial, like spasm. “It wasn’t like that. It wasn’t. Ray–”

She grabs his arm, turns him, forces Ray to look down at her. “Not like that, Ray, whatever he says. Whatever he thinks he knows, it’s wrong. She showed me, that much is true. She showed you to me, how you were made for me. How I was made for you.”

But Ray backs away from her, from both of them. Thinking about Nomar, the way his binary code, his fundamental systems had been altered from contemplating the shed. Thinking about Juliet Whiston whose mind had been changed. About vessels male and female. And Juliet’s calm, firm assertion that Frederick does what he believes is right.

There’s something wrong here, a subtlety, a lie that he senses, but can’t put his finger on.

How many people would you be willing to sacrifice to have Emma all to yourself, Marlowe?

She showed you to me, how you were made for me. How I was made for you.

What he’s being told isn’t enough. It doesn’t explain Paraclete, Gorgon, Micah, the stolen ring and rending shed. It doesn’t tell him why they pursued him from the beginning, or why Frederick has tried to kill him since.

Emma reaches for him again. “Ray.”

“What do you want from me?”

It’s Frederick who answers him. “I want my birthright, Marlowe. I want what you’ve stolen from me.”

“Your birthright?”

“They would have taken it away from me in time. Spurned me because I’m weak, because there wasn’t enough of my father in me, enough Whiston to make me worthy of the name. The Dag Maoudi rejected me from birth. But there was still hope until they found you, because even a weak link was better than no link at all. They’d created a barrier for themselves, you see. By making Emma perfect, they made perfection a requirement. They needed another just like her to take the last step away from rites of bloodshed. The mhuruk-a would accept nothing less. It is my birthright she would have given you.”

Horror, tingling like the taste of copper in his mouth. “You destroyed Paraclete to stop me from coming here?”

“I’ve committed many sins in your name, to prevent you or to drive you away. But you were too stupid, too resilient, too blinded. But not for selfishness, not just to save my birthright. I want you to understand that. I’m not an evil man, Marlowe, despite my failings.”

It’s there. He’s almost touching it. “Then why?”

“Because you are the one. Because you can commune with the mhuruk-a, just as Emma can. You are created in the spirit’s image. The mhuruk-a flows in your blood.”

Frederick pauses, angry, betrayed. “And through your seed.”

Unthinking, as if unnoticed, Emma’s small hands touch her stomach, a cover of protection. Ray stares at her.

“Now you understand,” Frederick says, bitter, his tone as dry and wasted as the desert winds. “For centuries, the mhuruk-a has been just a tool to us, something we could control with enough blood, enough murder. We needed it, and we detested it. But there was no other way to touch her fathomless power. As we became known, as we amassed our fortune, it became complicated to practice the Dao in secret. We already had our empire, and it was decided that in order to protect what we had already gained, we should allow the Dao to falter. We turned our back on the source of our might, and we saw our fortune wasted, our power and the things we had built wrested from our control by malcontents.

“We believed it was because we had failed in our diligence. But Grandfather knew differently, that it wasn’t just us. It was the mhuruk-a also. Bound for so long without communion, the tether between us grew thin and tenuous. Without communion, the spirit faded. Without the spirit, the family failed. He returned us to the old ways, to blood and ritual and sacrifice to bind the spirit to us again and revive our waning strength.

“You’ve changed all of that. Emma is the vessel; you are the one. But your child will be another thing entirely, a creature human in form but mhuruk-a in spirit. One of them, a new race of being, heir to the fundamental power of the universe, able to create or destroy at will, able to commune with not just the mhuruk-a in the Stone, but with all the mhuruk-i. Without the Dao and without mediation. Not a child at all, you see, but one step beneath a god. A Whiston god to raise us up, destroy our enemies, give all of human space into our hands. Do you see what you have wrought? Your seed will open the door to chaos through which the mhuruk-a and all her kind will enter and devour us all.”

But Ray shakes his head, denies it all. “No.”

Except Emma had placed her hands over her belly, where their child would grow.

It isn’t enough. It’s all speculation, fantasy, rationalization for the things Frederick has done. But it doesn’t explain anything.

“There never were any Lilaikens. It was just you, from the very beginning.”

He does what he believes is right.

“Do you suppose they’re aggrieved by the things that have been done in their name? I wonder sometimes. It’s hardly fair that they should be the ones who suffer for our crimes.”

“Our.”

“The Whistons and the Dag Maoudi.” Frederick bows his head slightly, a figure of penitence. “Don’t you understand? Even Grandfather Fram was deceived. He believed that the Dag Maoudi would be faithful to his vision and destiny. But before we existed, the Dag Maoudi were. They owned their world from horizon to horizon through their communion with the mhuruk-a. They cast themselves with us because we were an avenue to power again, a way in which they might reverse their course, possess a larger world. Through us, they sought to regain their dominance in a vaster arena. But the weakened Stone couldn’t grapple with a world so wide and complicated, especially as we faltered. It could only influence, and even that waned with time. But New Holyoke…ah, New Holyoke was new, fresh, simple. It could be designed with amenable elements from the start. All the Dag Maoudi needed was to revive the Stone with a new network of communion. Grandfather believed that the mhuruk-a, given free reign to choose those who would lead with us and beneath us, would return us to power. It’s why he built the Trust, to attract other minds, potential genetic and intellectual raw materials who could be manipulated, bred, trained in the way of the vessel to become those with whom the Stone could communicate. One generation after another, each a step forward toward perfection, toward Emma and the child she would bear. The whole colony has been built for this purpose, Marlowe, for you to come and give the perfect vessel a child who would break down the walls between us and the mhuruk-a. Can you comprehend it? All for the sake of power. Nothing but power.”

“But he was wrong,” Ray says.

“They were all wrong. The mhuruk-a in the Stone was just a shadow of itself. After so much neglect, there is not enough blood in the universe to bind her fully to their will again. She resents us because we compel her, but do not commune.”

” So you brought more of the mhuruk-i to New Holyoke.”

“Yes. A new spirit for the Stone, young and strong and malleable, as in the days of old.”

Archons of strife was what Jack Holcomb had called them. “You don’t know what you’ve done.”

“Oh, I know exactly what the Dag Maoudi have done, Marlowe. They have lied to us from the start, made us believe that their will was to serve the Whiston destiny. Perhaps that was true once, but no longer. Now, they’ve determined that they wish to rule again, and Amah believes they can control the revitalized Stone through your child. The Dag Maoudi have waited centuries to enslave all of us to the will of the mhuruk-i, and they no longer have need of the Whistons to further their goals, thanks to you and the ease with which you walked the path they set before you.

Frederick surprises him by scowling. “And I’m just as guilty, because I watched. I watched as they dismissed me as weak, drunken, failed Frederick Whiston, whom the mhuruk-a had rejected. I watched them claim the container bearing the mhuruk-i from the deserts of Terra to replenish the weakness of the one they had trapped in the Stone. I watched them destroy Fortitude, and claim responsibility in the name of the Lilaikens. I watched them send the mhuruk-i against other ships–your friends and colleagues. Why? Both because the mhuruk-i told them that those actions would bring you to Stratiskaya Daransk, and because attacks on the FSA would foment insurrection on the frontier. Colonial independence will create a vacuum of political authority in which they may solidify their grip on power here after the child is born. With the child to drive the Stone, and the mhuruk-i to enforce their will, the Dag Maoudi can rule the frontier. Knowing this, I still sat by and let them do exactly as they wanted–until they found you, that is, when it became obvious that they would spurn me in your favor. That changed everything.

“Can’t you see? From that moment, there was no birthright left for me. There was no future, because the Dag Maoudi would destroy the Whistons just as they destroyed everything else. I had no weapons to prevent them. My dear friend Townshend Wright has sought to deprive me of Whelemat, robbing me of my economic influence. My sister has become the vessel I do not have the ability to be, by which means I might have stirred the Stone against them. The Dag Maoudi have determined to replace me, heir of my father, with you–my seed with your seed–so that the vessel would be beyond my control.

“I am not weak, Marlowe. I have been methodically stripped of my power. They only believe I am weak, though I studied the same lore as the Dag Maoudi who despise me. Though I was able to steal from the Terran ring mhuruk-i of my own, who could be persuaded to do my bidding. Though I could lay the foundations of my own plans in darkness and secrecy.

“But even the theft of my birthright I could have borne. I would have allowed you to usurp my place in the Whiston line if it would have been just a reclamation of our family glory. But it’s not. I cannot countenance the Dag Maoudi treachery. I cannot endure an entire world under the domination of the mhuruk-a. Next to that, my birthright is meaningless. Evil. Better that the Whiston name be completely erased from memory than allow the Dag Maoudi to open the gates through which the mhuruk-i could enter our universe unfettered. That is what I have attempted to do, Commander Marlowe. I murdered Micah, one of our own children, to bind the mhuruk-i that I carried aboard the ship to me. I called them, held them in readiness, and when I was certain of you, that you were the one, I did all that was within my power to dissuade you.”

Ray stares at him. “You left the body in the storage area because you wanted it to be found.”

“I instructed the mhuruk-a to place the body in the open. I hoped it would warn you off. Given your history, given Ba’dai, it should have been sufficient. You should have seen that you were being manipulated from the start.”

He had, of course, but had failed to understand. All of his conclusions had been wrong.

“But you were too stubborn or foolish. I waited as long as I could, until it became obvious that you would persist until you had mated with my sister and unleashed hell on New Holyoke. I had no other choice. Only then did I send them forth. Against my sister. Against the Dag Maoudi. Against you. To destroy everyone and everything that could make this future come to pass. But you survived. You survived to ruin us all.”

Frederick lifts the gun at him, squeezes it in his hand. “I did all of these terrible things, but you are to blame, Marlowe. It’s all because of you.”

And even then, Ray tears his eyes away from the gun, from death. To Emma. This is too much for him; too much to grasp. All he requires is that she deny it. Just tell him one more time that Frederick is insane, and he’ll believe her. He wants to believe her.

“Emma?” Her name passes his lips like a plea.

But she says nothing. She isn’t even looking at him, but at the ground, and her lips curve in a private, secret smile. Her fingers caress the soft skin of her stomach, as though she can feel, see, experience the cells dividing within her.

“But why me?” Ray asks, whispering.

“Because you are the one.”

“Why? Why me!”

Frederick shrugs. “Who knows? Who cares? If the Dao has taught you anything, it should be that the mhuruk-i have their own ways that are beyond our reckoning. In you, they’ve found something essential.”

He does what he believes is right.

To destroy everyone and everything.

“What are you going to do with Emma after you kill me?”

He gives Ray a small, cold frown, like a child on the verge of tears. “What makes you believe that I have any interest in killing you now? You’ve become irrelevant. Killing you doesn’t prevent anything.”

The gun slides away from him in a slow and ponderous arc–away from him and toward Emma. He watches it turn aside forever, unable to breathe.

No!

Frederick Whiston says, “I should have done this a long time ago, Emma. But I was weak. I let myself love you. I loved you more than anyone, and you should have been mine. Just you and me, the way father intended.”

Ray, too far away, too stunned to be thinking clearly, lunges for him or just into the path of the bullet itself, he doesn’t know which.

And Emma’s head turns to the sound of her brother’s voice. She glares at him, fists clenched, eyes locked, and wails a high and keening note. She erupts with energy, a frisson of invisible, blistering flame. And the note she screams is a word; the word is a hammer, unspeakable, flung with the force of a galaxy caught, compressed, sucked into the pinpoint eye of a singularity.

Ray feels it blow past him, echoing thunder as it splits the air. He is brushed aside, a being of no consequence, battered to the ground. He lands flat on the grass, smothering in flowers, beside the pool of waxy flesh that was, until a moment ago, Frederick Whiston.

Behind him, Emma speaks with the voice of the shed, “Rejoice, brother! The vessel has accepted the seed of your child.”

It’s enough to make him scream. He doesn’t somehow. He lays still, his nostrils full of the odor of Frederick’s steaming remains, his evacuated bowels, his damp and bloody bonelessness. He lays still and lets his heartbeat and adrenaline thunder in his ears until the surge of panic passes.

Eventually, he rises and collects his clothing.

Emma, watching, says to him, “I’m pregnant with your child.”

Full of wonder, of awe, of pleasure, like a young bride to her husband. Abandoned once again by the mhuruk-a. Emma alone. She reaches for him in the darkness, as though her brother isn’t dead a small distance away, wanting to share this moment, this joy with him. He knows this scenario, has seen it played out on vids, in movies, his entire life. It’s a choreographed moment in which he’s supposed to smile, appear a bit dazed, then as it sinks in on him, he should grab her and swing her through the air, laughing–and just as quickly set her down again, his rough hands on her belly, terrified that he might have hurt the baby with his exuberance while she assures him everything is fine. That is the proscribed event protocol.

But Ray only stares at her with an expression that feels like horror until she withdraws again.

“There’s a great deal that should still be explained to you,” she says finally, “so that you understand. Things won’t be so different than they are now. Most people won’t even notice that things have changed. And if they do, they might even be happier for it. There won’t be any more need for blood, for the Dao.”

He already understands. Understanding is where the emptiness has come from. “How much of this did you know?”

“It’s complicated, Ray.”

“How much did you know?”

“He twisted things. It’s not like he said, and he would have gone on twisting things, destroying everything we’ve attempted to accomplish.” She clenches her fists, pulls herself up, straight and proud and rigid. “I’m glad he’s dead. I’m glad the mhuruk-a killed him. He’s done terrible things to me, to others, and what he would have done here would have been worse. In time, you’ll come to see that.”

“How much, Emma?” Ray thunders.

She blanches, stunned by his harshness. For a time, all she can do is look at him, quivering with anger or tears. All Ray can feel is heat, the molten, volcanic flood of betrayal. Slowly, Emma collects her gown–the Dao robe–drapes it about her shoulders, but does not fasten the clasps. As if she’s daring him to forget what they have done.

“Take me home,” she says.

“You can find your own goddamned way home.”

She doesn’t rise to his challenge, only nods. “That you’ve chosen to believe my brother changes nothing. It doesn’t change who you are, what we are. You’ll learn that eventually.”

She leaves him, passes close enough for him to touch, then goes on, vanishing into the trees. Ray watches her depart, but where she goes, he does not follow.

<– Chapter Eighteen / Chapter Twenty –>

On Thursday or whatever the locals call it, Ray rises late, having slept for hours. Too many hours, really, paying back the checks against he has written against his body in recent days. He wakes in the early afternoon with the heat of the sun on his face and sweat in his hair, in his eyes, coating his limbs like oil. And he remembers what it used to be like, before boot camp, before the desert, when he was still in high school. Late summer, when the whole world smelled of sweet corn and sycamore leaves and stuck in his nose because of the humidity. When the only thing on his mind was finding a way to get laid. In those days, he’d lie in bed for half an hour or more, slowly circling toward wakefulness, maybe spend a few minutes imagining plausible scenarios in which the lovely and libidinous Sarah Ferguson would burst into his room now. Or now. Or now. (It never seemed to work.) Burst in and confess not so much her undying love as her immodest demand for instant sexual gratification. Sarah Ferguson still remains his all time jerk off queen if judged by quantity.

Time changes everything. Time and age. Today when he wakes late, all he can think about is the lost hours, wasted productivity, murderers, and shed and all the things he learned. Everything he has yet to do.

These are the things that get grown men out of bed, and he hates it. Hates it, but throws off the blankets, groans past his assorted aches and stitches and bullet tracks, jumps into the shower. Even when he emerges, dripping fat diamonds of cool and pungent New Holyoke water, he still feels muzzy, dense, exhausted. He locates fresh clothes in one of the dressers, heavy khaki pants and a linen shirt that looks like something only the most jingoistic of tourists would consider fashionable. He makes a mental note to have Emma take away Jagiri’s cred chip, if they even use cred chips around here. Jagiri is abusing his power. Jagiri’s fashion sense has decided to use his talents for evil. This much is clear.

Downstairs, he makes a lunch of cold cereal, a can of peanuts, a pot of coffee, and finds a note on the table from Emma inviting him up to the manor house whenever he decided to drag his lazy carcass out of bed. He wonders why she didn’t just wake him when she was here, and why it does not freak him out that someone had been rattling around the guest cottage while he was upstairs, unconscious, without having locked the door to his room. Wonders if he would be any more freaked out if that person had not been Emma, and why a distinction would exist in the first place.

These are things he should have thought about before, that he hasn’t allowed himself to consider adequately. Because on Paraclete, he was too busy trying to implicate her brother in a murder, too busy just experiencing her, fascinating himself with the curious and unique patterns of her newness. Exploring her with a bizarre sense of déjà vu that he still does not properly understand.

And now, his head is too full of other thoughts supplied by Thomas Malcolm and Townshend Wright and Colonel Ritchie. Concepts that struggle mightily to shake the foundations of everything he has thought he knew.

Last night, after he’d come home, he burned a couple of hours around midnight scaling the Port Authority net for updates on the salvage operation. There was nothing new. EED hadn’t recovered the data core yet, or if they had, they hadn’t dumped it anywhere on the network for detailed analysis. He doubts that they will. Amah wouldn’t have promised him there would be no proof of Frederick’s savagery if she couldn’t make good on it. It wouldn’t even do him any good to raise hell with Colonel Ritchie about it, because the data belongs to PA, even if the hardware is EED. Ritchie had taken the time to send him an encrypted personal message explaining as much. That he’d do what he could, pull some strings, but he was really as much at the mercy of the Port Authority’s political apparatus as Ray was. It’s one of those ancient and hoary cooperative treaty deals, something that must have made perfect sense at the time it was signed, when powers and responsibilities were being divided in such a way as to give all sides the illusion that they had a thumb in all possible pies without trying to look like anyone was keeping any pies all to themselves.

And Ray got the distinct impression that he wasn’t interested in trying very hard, that he would prefer to save the egregious throwing of his weight around for opportunities that more directly benefited the EED.

Ray doesn’t care. The lost case file he and Rodriguez and Kilgore had constructed would have been nice, but he doesn’t need it anymore. No one is going to prosecute Frederick Whiston. Amah was right about that, too.

And murdering Micah Uytedehaage was the least of his sins.

Just one of thousands, tens of thousands.

Certainly, the other crimes weren’t as intimate, as personal as troweling out the viscera of the victim with your own two hands, but Frederick was just as responsible for the many as for the one. Collusion made him responsible, even if he hadn’t necessarily been the one to pull the trigger.

Those assumptions were predicated on the belief that Frederick Whiston was a Lilaiken agent, or at the very least, a facilitator for the activities of other Lilaiken agents.

That was what he thought he had learned at Bass-Ingersoll TransGalactic Shipping, scrolling through accounts, through a digital ledger: that a packing crate of the size and dimension specified by Jack Holcomb as containing a stolen Solomonic ring and its slumbering shed, had been delivered to Whelemat shortly after the destruction of the vessel Fortitude.

Which should have meant the following:

1. Link: Frederick Whiston to Lilaiken separatists.

2. Lilaiken separatists to the theft of the ring, to the attacks on Fortitude, Gorgon, Asp, Hegemony.

3. The method from those ships to Paraclete.

4. From Paraclete to Micah Uytedehaage.

5. Micah to Frederick.

A nice and perfect circle of reasoning, and in the center, Frederick Whiston, always Frederick, radiating harm like the spokes of a wheel. Neat and tidily packaged.

Except it was only window dressings over shoddy constructions, fabrications based on faulty assumptions. Townshend Wright told him as much, and as deeply and desperately as Ray would like to punch Wright’s smugness all the way into the back of his skull, he was too credible to be discounted, and the things he said were too easily verified for him to have lied outright.

But what he asked Ray to do was unthinkable. It was worse than going back to the beginning and starting all over again, because it pulled the heart right out of Ray and Jack Holcomb’s operating hypothesis. Remove the Lilaiken element from the chain of events, and everything that had happened since the theft of the artifact ceased to cohere. The pattern vanished, left him with nothing to explain the why of it all.

Except, as Townshend Wright would have it, the Dag Maoudi.

The Dag Maoudi and the Dao.

Which meant that there was either more going on than he was aware of…or that there were lies embedded in his fact set. He could have picked at that thorn all night long and never come any closer to extracting it from his side.

So unless he chooses to just ignore the assessments of everyone he has known on New Holyoke, everyone in a position to have access to reliable knowledge, he must conclude that he knows nothing about why any of this has happened. He has no concept of motive, and no suspect pool except Frederick Whiston and the Dag Maoudi, who have taken possession of the ring and the shed contained within it.

And in the middle of it is Emma, vessel of the mhuruk-a, core of this impenetrable mystery that is the Dao Maed Vitouri.

None of which he can prove.

All of which leaves him in a position in which his only option is to go forward, to play this game, to see what might be learned, and…

Just and. Just the open-ended future.

Ray rises from the dining room table, drops his dirty dishes in the sink and makes his way out of the guest cottage, up the slope to the Grange. He gets lost in the art galleries as he tries to pick his way along the route he and Jagiri traced the night of the dinner party, but eventually finds his way to a heavy set of doors that lead to the piazza in the center. He emerges again beneath the early autumn sky, draws himself across the flagstone paths and withering grass, naked to the blind and vacant eyes of the manor house’s many windows. He stops at the base of Emma’s tower, tries the door, but finds it locked. Beside it is an ancient comm interface, just a speaker and manual command buttons. He presses the transmit toggle and speaks Emma’s name.

“Good morning, sleepyhead,” she answers almost at once, the poor speaker system translating her voice as a tinny monotone. “I’m on my way down.”

He shrugs, waits, digs his hands in his pockets. A few moments later, Emma unlocks the door and steps outside. She is fresh, fragrant, smiling. Her eyes are so clear, they are almost translucent. She takes his hand, lets him kiss her softly in greeting. Only when he pulls away does he realize that she is pale, trembling, that there are the beginnings of bruises beneath her eyes, as though she’s been up all night.

“What’s wrong?” he asks.

“Nothing now. I missed you all morning.”

“Are you feeling okay?” How do you say it without making it sound like an insult. “You look tired.”

“I haven’t been sleeping well. Readjusting to New Holyoke’s schedule, I suppose.”

“Shipping lag,” Ray says, nodding. “I worry about you.”

“Part of it is the Dao, yes,” she says, as if she knows what he’s thinking. “It takes some of my energy to prepare for the mhuruk-a. And I have so many things to do. Boring and tedious things I won’t bother you with, but I’m afraid I won’t be very good company today.”

“I should let you rest.”

Emma shakes her head. “No. I want to be with you. I thought we might make a visit to the mining headquarters today.”

Ray isn’t particularly interested in spending any more time around Townshend Wright, so he says, “How about we just stay in? There will be plenty of time for me to acquaint myself with Blackheath Grange. What I’d really like to see is the Trust operation, since I’ve heard so much about it.”

Emma laughs. “Of course. I should have thought of that yesterday.”

“Yesterday, I wanted you all to myself. Today I’m willing to share you with the other members of your household.”

She checks her watch. “Now is as good a time as any. The children should be getting ready for their afternoon hour of free time, so we won’t be interrupting their studies.”

“Lead the way, darling.”

“I’d rather take your arm, thank you. If I lead, you’ll probably follow behind leering at my backside, which is certainly not an example we want to be setting.”

She knows him entirely too well already.

***

The Trust wing is much less confusing than the manor house, seemingly constructed along a theme of linearity. The ground floor is classrooms, playrooms, computing centers. The second floor and above are dormitories segregated by age and gender. Ray had expected something akin to the facilities he encountered in basic training: drab, utilitarian, vaguely crumbling and reeking of industrial cleaning agents. Instead, what he encounters is a succession of gaily lit spaces, bright and vibrant and merrily pastel. The teachers and administrative staff he meets are young Dag Maoudi with brilliant smiles, cheery demeanors. Living incarnations of elementary school archetypes.

At liberty, the children of the Trust bustle through the halls like storm cells, heavy wall clouds spawning tornadoes of laughter, of activity, of casual tumbles and feckless destruction. Their shouts and giggles tumble out of doorways with a summer camp liveliness.

It’s not like any summer camp Ray has known, though. Their entertainment isn’t pine cone crafts and construction paper, and their instruction is a bit more heady than First Aid for Beginners. In the intermediate classrooms, the interactive wall screen still reflects the complex and imponderable Tchin-Yoo Proof Ray didn’t encounter until third-year calculus in college. The kids in the computing center aren’t playing video games, but designing transportation node simulators and surface-launch low orbital satellite tracking complexes.

Back on the first level, they stop in the center of the main corridor, and Ray says: “I don’t know what to say, Emma. If this is what your intermediate kids are doing, what are the advanced student projects? Do they get to pick between solving world hunger and developing plans for peace in the Middle East?”

She pats him gently on the shoulder. “It isn’t so bad, Ray. These are exceptional children. We don’t give them anything they can’t handle.”

“Yes, but where are the older kids? I haven’t seen anyone over the age of twelve or thirteen.”

“They’re all out in the community. After we’ve provided them with sufficient instruction, we place them with various corporate holdings either here in the city or out in the habs where they can work with experts in their chosen fields of study. Internships, I guess you’d call them. The more responsible ones actually live away from the manor, manage their own affairs to the extent to which they’re capable–with our financial support, of course. When they’re ready, we set up long term employment prospects for them, and they leave the Trust behind for good.”

“Do they ever leave New Holyoke, too?”

Emma turns to him, frowning. “They could, I suppose. I’m not aware of such a thing happening, at least not in my lifetime. We don’t really track the Trust children, though.”

“But they could leave if they wanted to. I mean, you don’t have them sign some sort of lifetime agreement to serve the colony in return for all the time and money you’ve invested in their education.”

“Of course not. They remain because they like it here, Ray. For many of them, the Trust is the only family they’ve known and New Holyoke is the only home they’ve ever embraced.” She continues to look at him, her brown furrowed. “Why would you think anything else?”

“It’s just curiosity. These kids could go anywhere in the universe and make a decent living with the skills you’re teaching them. I find it odd that they stay.”

“In such a backwater, you mean?”

“Well, yes.”

“It isn’t ‘staying’. It’s building. And yes, that’s something we teach them. It’s a value that we inculcate from the very start, that there is something glorious and worthwhile in taking the raw materials of a new world and making them fit for human habitation. We like it here, Ray. The children like it. There’s a freedom and scope of possibility–a hope for the future–inherent in the frontier that can’t be acquired on the core worlds. There, everything is rigid, social roles are defined, progress is linear because there is a weight of history bearing down on innovation and creativity. Here, we’re all free to make our own ways, to travel different roads than the ones traveled by those who have gone before us. That means we’ll make our share of mistakes, and some of them will be disastrous, but the things that work will be new in human experience. The legacy each of us leaves the New Holyoke that will come is unique, special, wondrous. Most people can only dream of the opportunities available to every citizen of this world.”

He has a response to that, to her glowing idealism. Something about self-determinism that seems to apply to everyone except the Whistons themselves. Something about the curious dissonance between theory and practice. But as he’s about to embark on it, he is caught up in a maelstrom of midget limbs and pre-pubescent shouts. A football spirals a few centimeters above his head. He dodges, ducks, crashes into a dozen small bodies would have otherwise streamed around him like an army of ants. One of the children sprawls at his feet as the whooping congregation scurries past.

Ray offers the boy a hand up, apologizing. Then, “Hey, hey! Mr. John Robert Rose!”

The kid from Paraclete, expert in all things Captain Shadow. He stares at Ray from the ground, spread-eagled, looking dazed. “Why did you have to get in my way?”

“Sorry, buddy. I didn’t see you.”

John Robert levers himself into a sitting position, crosses his legs, begins a detailed survey of his extremities. He jabs his elbow at Ray. He’s got a serious case of carpet rash, just beginning to bleed. “You hurt me.”

“Ouch!” Just rub some dirt on it.

He doesn’t say it, doesn’t tell the kid to buck up and deal with it, because John Robert is staring at him with that eight year old mix of fascination and accusation, that you-broke-it-you-bought-it intensity that will very shortly turn to tears.

Ray hunkers down beside him, examining the elbow with the solemn attention it deserves. “Well, that’s a pretty serious scuff, isn’t it? Maybe we should get you to the nurse’s station or something. What do you say?”

“I just need to put some water on it. Can you take me to the bathroom?”

“Sure.”

Ray scoops him up, holding body and violated elbow against his chest, thinking this is probably more of a spectacle than this particular medical emergency deserves, but more than a small part of it is for Emma, because this is the type of behavior women expect nice men to exhibit around children they’ve just knocked down. He grins at her, shrugs.

“We’re going to wander down to the end of the hall for a bit. I’ll be right back.”

Emma points the opposite direction. “There’s a first aid station down there.”

“It’s okay. This isn’t anything we can’t handle. No reason to get the medical staff all excited.”

Ray and John Robert swing away, bouncing down the corridor. Ray is doing everything he can to keep the boy from bursting into tears, because even this pseudo-parental action is severely taxing his mental database of appropriate treatment of strange children. They push through the bathroom door and Ray sets John Robert on the counter next to the sink. He turns on the water, playing with the temperature until it’s comfortable to the touch, then assembles a paper towel compress.

John Robert holds the towels in place, not speaking, just watching Ray.

“So how are they treating you, guy?” Ray says.

“It’s okay.”

“Feeding you well enough?”

“Yes.”

“Making friends?”

“Some.”

Ray puffs out his cheeks, scrambling for more topics. He comes up blank. “That’s good. Hey, let’s take a look at that elbow, okay?”

But John Robert pulls away from him. “I think it’s still bleeding.”

“It wasn’t really bleeding in the first place.”

The boy just nods, watching him with those big, dark eyes. He says, “Are you a policeman, Mr. Marlowe?”

Ray lifts his head, stunned and questioning. Then he remembers that the last time John Robert saw him was on Paraclete in full Marine mode. Toting a rifle and rescuing the Whiston household. Shooting it out with Ziggy in the corridor. It’s a logical enough assumption for a child to make.

“I guess I’m sort of a policeman, yeah.”

“A soldier,” the boy says, serious and probing.

“That’s closer to the truth. I’m one of the good guys.”

“Soldiers always think they’re one of the good guys. If they didn’t, there wouldn’t be any wars.”

“You’re a pretty smart kid.” He resists the urge to tousle Mr. John Robert Rose’s hair. It occurs to him that this would be considered some breach of childhood etiquette.

John Robert looks away, toward the bathroom door. “You didn’t hurt my arm. I did it this morning, wrestling with Pete Sklenicka in our room. He’s ten.”

Ray just nods. “You’re wondering what happened on the ship, aren’t you? I imagine nobody has taken the time to explain things to you. It’s okay. Most of us are still trying to figure it out, too.”

But the boy wrinkles his nose, angry. “I don’t like it here, Mr. Marlowe.”

“I know, J.R. It’s a strange place. Strange people. It’s going to take some time, but you’ll get used to it.”

“I’m not homesick. The orphanage on Orduvai sucked. They fed us protein paste for every meal. There were rats in the bathrooms. I mean it sucked. I’d never want to go back there.”

“Okay.”

John Robert faces him. He is solemn, peering at Ray through eyelids pinched almost closed. There’s something furtive about the expression. Suspicious and intense and terrified. “I hate it here. They seem nice. They treat us well. Sometimes, I even think they care about us, but they aren’t what they seem to be, Mr. Marlowe. Our teachers and watchers and guardians. We talk about these things when they think we’re asleep, after they’ve locked the doors and turned on the security system. The other kids, the ones who have been here for months or years, they say that the alarms aren’t to keep strangers out, but to make sure that none of us escape.”

“I’m sure they’re just teasing you. Because you’re the new guy, you know? They always give the new kid some grief.”

Except Ray can’t help but remember how safe the Trust kept Micah Uytedehaage.

And what was it that Thomas Malcolm had said? I think the Trust and the Whistons have an alarming tendency to lose kids to accidents.

“I thought so at first, too. This isn’t the first time I’ve been the new kid. I know what it’s like. But I don’t sleep very well in strange places. I have bad dreams sometimes, so I stay up late, long after the others have gone to bed. And at night, the teachers rise. About an hour, I think, after the last of the lights have gone out in the main house. They rise, and you can hear them padding down the halls, opening doors. They take kids with them, the others say. Sometimes you can hear a sound, like a kid makes when he’s awakened from sleep. A small cry, and then they go away. And in the morning, someone is always missing. Usually the slower kids, the ones who aren’t keeping up with their studies, who aren’t as smart as the rest of us. They’re just gone, and the older boys have told us never to ask where they went, that if we do ask, we’ll just be told that they’ve been placed in a remedial school until they can catch up, but they never do. They never come back.

“And the older boys say that those who do ask end up being the next to go missing.”

I think the Trust and the Whistons have an alarming tendency to lose kids to accidents.

Ray takes a breath, an inhalation that sounds to him like a gasp. “Are you sure?”

“They say it only gets bad, it’s only every night during this time of the year, when the teachers are preparing for the festival. The rest of the time, we’re safe. Mostly safe. That’s why they brought us here. The Trust brings in new students just before the festival, to replace the ones they’re going to take away. The older kids say we don’t have much to worry about if we keep up with our studies. They prefer to take the old ones, the teens who aren’t here any longer, who they say have gone off to work for other people and learn trades that will help the colony. It’s easier to hide when they go missing.” John Robert is quiet for a time, chews his lip. “Get me out of here, Mr. Marlowe. Please. I don’t like it. I think they kill kids here just like what happened to Micah. I don’t want to be the next one.”

The bathroom door springs open then, and a Dag Maoudi teacher enters. A young man, burly and strong, all smiles and sympathy. Emma is behind him, framed in the doorway.

“I hear we had a tumble,” the teacher exclaims. “All bandaged up now, eh?”

Ray exchanges a final look with John Robert, but any expression of fear the boy might have shown is hidden behind a mask of childhood suffering, pouting lips, imminent tears.

“Just a scuff,” Ray says. “I think we’ve just about taken care of it.”

“Good, good. Let’s get you off to class then, John Robert.”

The Dag Maoudi takes John Robert’s hand and helps him hop down from the counter. Without a wave, even a glance, the boy and teacher make their exit.

***

This is the worst part: the lying awake, the staring at the ceiling in the dark as he tests scenarios, plugs oddly shaped pieces together to see what might fit where, the surreptitious peeking out of windows and stillness and lights winking out one at a time until he feels like the only man left awake on the planet. All of this compounded by fatigue, because even though he slept late this morning, his body is still whining about the sleep deficit he’s racked up over the last four or five days. It’s hard to muster the energy to think about things, let alone consider doing things. He feels heavy and dense and stupid, like his skin has been stuffed with sawdust.

He watches the last window at the Grange go dark, a nondescript third floor window. He checks his watch, twiddles his thumbs for the hour John Robert advised him to wait. It is an interminable period, and he has to put himself through a battery of calisthenics just to keep himself awake.

At the end, he slips out the door, down the stairs, away from the cottage. He winds his way up the slope from cottage to Grange, keeping clear of the path and its lighted walkways. He creeps to the back door, pauses to investigate the lintel and jambs. John Robert mentioned the security system for the Trust wing, how he suspected that it was designed to keep the children in rather than predators out. There might be something to that, because Ray finds no security on this door. Not cameras, not proximity sensors, not anything. Even the aged lock shows no sign of recent use, and it most certainly is not locked now.

Inside, the house is silent except for the quiet thrum of the environmental controls. Cool air wafts from vents he can’t see. There is a faint odor of must, of age, of wood polish. He has no sure idea of where to begin, but he took care this afternoon following the visit to the Trust wing, to note the main staircases, to pay close attention to those that seemed to descend from the ground floor. Ones that might lead to cellars or sub-basements. There was one that Emma pointed out specifically, back toward the kitchen, a disused passage that she said led to the Whiston comm hub. She thought he should be aware of it in case he found it necessary to check in with his Terran superiors.

He finds it with little trouble, using the dim lights in the halls for guidance, sticking to the middle of the corridors so his footfalls are muffled by the carpet runners. He pauses every few meters to listen for sounds that would indicate someone following him, or someone ahead around the next corner, but the house is devoid of human sound. It would be easy to mistake it for abandoned space. He doesn’t like that thought, the idea of being alone in the Grange.

He goes past the kitchen entrance, peers in on industrial refrigeration units, yawning pantries, ovens large enough for Gretel to bake a dozen witches at once. At the end of this hall is a staircase, narrow and creaking, a servants’ passage. Below the steps, crammed into a shadowed nook, is a door hanging slightly ajar. He opens it, sticks his head inside and finds another flight of stairs. They are steep, pitched at a neck-breaking angle, crowded in by bare plaster walls. He takes the steps one at a time, walking on the tips of his toes, keeping to the edges in case they creak. At the bottom is another passage, a dogleg landing and another flight of stairs just like the one he has descended. Ray follows the passage a short way to the first door, peeks inside the crowded comm hub, then ducks out again.

Stairs again, carefully, quietly. At the next landing, the plaster walls give way to bare stone and mortar. A pair of lanterns cast an unsteady yellow glow. It’s damp here, punching into bedrock, down below the water table. In places, water has eaten through the mortar and greenish, algae-ridden rivulets stream down the surface of the rock. The air is chilled, tastes of rot and age, oily like a miasma of tuberculosis. Down and down, wooden stairs become carved stone steps that sag in the center from the passage of countless feet.

And then there are no more steps, just a long corridor of flat, meticulously joined stones and evenly spaced lanterns. He waits for a moment, catching his breath, letting the muscles in his legs unclench from so much creeping. Above the sound of his own breathing, he can hear a murmur of voices. Just noise, a grumble of consonants and undifferentiated syllables. A great host of voices.

Ray realizes that he doesn’t have his gun. He left it in its harness, in the wardrobe. It’s too late to go back for it.

So he moves forward, still stealthy, balancing on the balls of his feet to minimize the slap and echo of his approach against the naked stone. At the end of the hall is another passage to the right, a brief chute to a rounded doorway like the vault of a subterranean lava flume. He becomes aware that the voices he has heard, but not understood, are speaking in a strange tongue. A guttural language, harsh and terse and taciturn in its pronunciation. He edges nearer, crouches low and presses his body against the wall.

At the lip of the chamber, he stops. He watches. He does not dare to breathe.

Here are the Dag Maoudi, dozens of them, young and old, teachers and servants, more than Ray had ever imagined. The room is small, unevenly cut to give the illusion of craggy walls and tormented stone, like an evacuated lava dome. The rock is black, volcanic, faintly shimmering like polished ebony. Around the edges are pits of fire that smoke and spit hot red sparks as though the wood was damp. The scent of their burning is pungent, exotic, aromatic in a way that reminds Ray of the Thai jungle. An equatorial smell.

In the center of the room is a square platform of hewn rock, rectangular slabs laid side by side. At the corners are four pillars pitted and scoured by age and weather, and in the center is another stone, dark and brooding, ancient in appearance. The firelight flickers against it, illuminating strange glyphs, hints of writing, loops and swirls gouged into the surface. Ray has seen these before, imperfect reproductions scrawled into the living flesh of the Dag Maoudi. The stele itself is ringed about with circles, concentric patterns, wheels within wheels.

The Dag Maoudi gather at the fringes of the platform, their backs to the chamber’s entrance, hunkered down. The men wear merkins of tanned animal skin, the women loincloths of the same material. Their flesh glistens with sweat from the heat of the flames, and they seem to lean forward, focused on the platform, lost in ritual or reverie.

Because on the stage before them are three young men, pale and languorous, their heads sagging to the side, their eyes drooping. Two of them lounge against the corner pillars, all but asleep. The third stands in the foreground, leaning heavily against the shaft of a wooden spear. They are naked except for the merkins.

Amah rises from the front of the row of the gathering. She takes a place off to the side, straightens her broad and powerful shoulders, her pendulous breasts hanging against her belly. She lifts her face toward the apex of the vault, and cries out in a loud voice.

“En ditoshe garat hui?”

The boys on the platform, clutching their spears, jump at the sudden noise, momentarily shocked from their stupor.

The Dag Maoudi respond with one voice: “En ditoshe garat hui?”

Amah nods at them, speaks again: “Who needs to be chieftain?”

“Cho-yu! Cho-yu!”

“Blessed are we, the Dag Maoudi, the children of gods, the bearers of life, the seed of mighty Goru Da.”

“Blessed.”

“Blessed are we at this time, the fortunate and faithful, the keepers of the Dao Maed Vitouri.”

“Blessed.”

“Blessed is the sacrifice. Blessed is the blood.”

“Blessed is. Blessed is.”

“Blessed is the mhuruk-a who makes our enemies tremble.”

“Blessed is the mhuruk-a.”

“And Blessed are the ones who serve. Blessed is the vessel.”

“Blessed are the ones who rise.”

“Who needs to be chieftain?”

“En ditoshe garat hui?”

Amah presses her hands together, bows her head before them. From the back of the chamber, a lone figure rises. Dark, familiar. Ray clamps his mouth shut so he will not make a sound.

Jagiri Oh-Kar.

He makes his way toward the platform, and the Dag Maoudi part like a sea wave broken by the prow of a mighty ship. Jagiri bears no expression but concentration, a ritualized intensity that is fierce and savage and withering.

He approaches the young man at the front of the platform, and stops. In his hands are a clutch of strange weeks, stalks like dragon grass, and a narrow clay pot like a wine flagon.

“Cho-yu! Cho-yu! Hsst,” he says.

The Trust orphan blinks at him, bewildered. He sways on his feet as though he’s on the verge of falling over.

“Hotu ome kakisoma tot chichode.”

Jagiri speaks and grins, showing wide white teeth. He kneels before the young man and places the pot and weeds at his feet like an offering.

“En ditoshe garat hui?” Then, disturbed, he says. “Getocka mui. Dodope.”

The Dag Maoudi hear and laugh, a bitter and spiteful echo.

But it is Jagiri who smiles. From the hands of the young man, he takes the spear, turns to the side, strikes a pose as if he’s about to hurl it across the length of the chamber.

Instead, with a spring and a roar, he lunges with the spear, drives it through the young man’s torso. In the near silence, Ray hears the boy gasp, a howling intake of breath, a grunt of dimly perceived agony. His eyes bulge, his mouth drops open. Jagiri bares his teeth and wrenches the spear free, lets him fall.

Jagiri leaps free, brandishes the spear like a bayonet, plunges across the platform to another of the young men, and impales him against pillar where he leans. Then the third. None of them cry out, none of them move to fight back or flee. They stare and wait and ponder the doom the Dag Maoudi have staged for them.

And at the end, Jagiri Oh-Kar throws his arms above his head, grips the spear and cries out: “Kapikome tabu hatudime sharundae!”

The Dag Maoudi rise and answer his call with a thunderous shout. “Kapikome tabu hatudime sharundae!”

They leap and clap their hands, surge toward the platform and the bodies of the young men they have just murdered. Ray can’t see what it is that they’re doing because of the press of bodies, but there are flashes like knives, and there are great clay bowls passed from hand to hand, a fire brigade of crimson stained buckets. The bowls slowly gravitate from the center of activity, from the dazzling knives, to the edge, to the platform’s focus, where Amah stands in great dignity beside the ancient stele. She receives the offerings of blood, lifts them high and pours the contents of the bowl over the stone. The crimson stain streaks the sides, traces curious patterns around circles and rings, glyphs and characters.

And with each bowl, the Dag Maoudi raise up a ragged and celebratory cheer.

And with each bowl, Amah says, “We bid thee rise, mighty mother. Blessed is the mhuruk-a. We welcome the coming of the Dao Maed Vitouri. We invite you to share the glorious vessel. Whisper to us words of Wisdom as you have always done. Teach us to rise, to beat our enemies to dust, for our sacrifices are worthy.”

The blood runs from stele to shallow pools culled in the rock. One by one, the Dag Maoudi kneel and press their hands into the pools. They touch their faces and arms, their chests and thighs; they cover themselves with the blood of their victims.

“Teach us to rise, to beat our enemies to dust. Blessed is the mhuruk-a! Welcome is the coming of the Dao!”

Their voices are a din and clamor, a savagery of ecstatic voices. It isn’t human voices that Ray hears, that pierce his consciousness like lancets, but a roar and a howl that he knows. A frenetic and blistering concussion of sound that spans eons, that bridges impossible distances of hidden space.

Shed, he thinks. Mhuruk-a.

It emerges from the stone, a flickering and insubstantial shadow of being, more suggestion than form, a wisp of power like dissipating smoke.

The Dag Maoudi clamor ceases. They drop to their knees, heads bowed. All but Amah, who lifts her face to the mhuruk-a as a priestess in her own temple.

“We bid you rise,” she says. “Rise and take the vessel. Welcome is the coming of the Dao.”

The shed contemplates her, grave and weary. I am weak, and I hunger.

“Bless us, and you will be filled. The way has been made, but for now, you must abide. You must celebrate the blood and the perfection of the vessel.”

I will abide. And in time, I will be filled.

“Blessed is the mhuruk-a.”

Amah lowers her head, and the shed vanishes.

Does not vanish, Ray knows, but trades the stele for the vessel. For Emma. And he realizes that the chamber itself, the distance he has traveled, has wound back beneath the Grange. If he imagined the route in cross section, he would find this vault to be directly below Emma’s tower. Her circular Faery Turret, a metaphorical stele in which the mhuruk-a might be contained, might reside.

Finally, Ray recoils, unable to bear any more. He withdraws shuddering and nauseous, ready to vomit. Needing to expel this darkness. Desperate to escape the things he has seen.

In horror, with the echo of the Dag Maoudi still in his ears, he flees back the way he came. Down the corridor, up the flight of stone steps, taking them two at a time. He’s less concerned about not being heard than about just putting space between himself and chamber. Ascending to wooden stairs and plaster walls, banging into the passage with the comm hub. Up and up, to the kitchen, the house itself, slicing through passages and corridors he hardly recognizes.

And eventually he finds himself in the main hall, completely disoriented, nearer the front doors than the back. A sweeping marble staircase arches toward the second floor to his left. To his right is the entry foyer, shimmering with light.

He stops, gathers himself. Tries to steady his jangled nerves.

From the corner of his eye, he detects movement on the second floor landing. Ray jerks aside, ready to dash, ready to break someone’s spine. Ready to do something other than experience his own helplessness.

Frederick Whiston, dark and sour, rumpled in his evening jacket, frowns down at him. “Have you seen enough then, Mr. Marlowe? Have you had your fill of surprise?”

“Get the fuck away from me,” Ray says, snarling. Killing Frederick would go a long way toward satisfying his rage at this moment. It’s not a temptation he could endure for long. “You’re no better than they are, and we both know it.”

“Well, I’d hardly argue with you over that point. The question is, what are you going to do about it?”

“I’m going to get Emma out of this place, and then I’m going to make you pay. Every fucking one of you.”

Frederick answers his contempt with a mournful shake of his head. “That fascinates me. Here you have just observed the faithful servants of this household and this family murdering three innocents…it was three, wasn’t it? They like to re-enact that escape of Goru Da the night before the Dao. No matter! My point being that you have just witnessed this terrible crime, and your first impulse is to rescue my lovely sister rather than leap about seeking justice for the victims.” Frederick holds up a hand to keep Ray from responding. “I know, who would believe such a thing? To whom would you appeal? You don’t need to defend yourself to me. I know perfectly well what you’re thinking. It’s just curious, that’s all. A bookend reaction to the one aboard Paraclete. How many people would you be willing to sacrifice to have Emma all to yourself, Marlowe? Ask yourself that question, and the number had better start pretty high, because by my count, you’re already well over twelve thousand. I don’t believe even Paris loved Helen so much as to make that grave a sacrifice.”

Ray has no answer for him. He can’t explain lunacy to a madman. He tosses a final curse at Frederick Whiston, then turns away. Through the foyer, out the front door, around the house to the cottage where he began.

He’s done. He’s angry and impotent and exhausted. The galaxy is not big enough to contain his outrage at the things he has seen, or at the things he has been made to understand. He strips off his clothes and falls into bed, glaring into the night, glaring into himself.

Somewhere in there, between staring into the physical darkness and the muddled darkness of his experiences, Ray tumbles down the slope of sleep.

***

And it’s still dark. Warm dark, not New Holyoke autumn, but oily, sweaty, tropical darkness. He smells trees and damp soil, fruit rot and sharp ocean tang. The odor of malaria, pungent. The night is filled with sound. The scuttling of small feet through the underbrush, the whir of insects whose wings are the size of his palm, whose thick bodies are pulpy, liquid. Distant, the sound of surf crashing against cliffs, burbling up soft sanded beaches. A crash of thunder, scent of monsoon rain. Nearer, voices mutter, fire flickers. Shouting.

Who is he?

He is cartilage and teeth, dorsal finned, shark-toothed. He is black, moonlit eyes and sealskin flesh. He is tamping heart and suckling, ravenous maw. He is, and he is, and he is…none of that and all of it. Form and verisimilitude. And motionlessness. He is Watcher, Keeper, Vision, One. Fascinated by stone.

Stone.

Tall, as tall as a man, a plinth, black as the night, volcanic rock polished and formed, rounded and chiseled, ringed in circles. Concentric circles. Ring within ring, and characters. Slashes etched in rock, messages, hieroglyphs both delicate and savage at once. Carved with violence, point and angle and line.

But mostly circle and ring, circle and ring, spinning like a gyre. He looks away.

Hush. This is a secret most grave, that he can look away. To teach is to learn; to observe is to learn; to commune is to learn. And to teach, to urge.

The rest is waiting.

Waiting, waiting, waiting, which is a little thing until the last, when moments stretch into eons, and the light of stars ages between heartbeats.

Cho-yu! Cho-yu! Hsst. Whisper and stealth. The young men, flint spears leaning against shoulders, sleepy, worn, muzzied by kesh root, chewed and spat. Three of them. They hear the call, the pad of bare feet on mud, dark form emerging from the shadows between thatched huts. Not spindly, not root ravaged and belly starved, but strong, whole, hale.

Goru Da, prince, chief in waiting. Except, except…cowardice. Rejected by the father. Weak willed. Does not hunt, does not fight, does not raise his hand except to stroke the flesh of women. But stealthy, clever.

Listen:

He is all smiles, teeth as wide as gates, reflected in the light from the fire pits beside where the young men sit. He hails them again, cho-yu! And he has jugs and kesh, and what is this? Disgrace does not mean enmity. Hotu ome kakisoma tot chichode. I have known you since we were this tall. We are one.

En ditoshe garat hui? Who needs to be chieftain? What threat can the Ma’huru bring now that these others, these pale men have come from across the water? The Ma’huru are gone, washed away like sand in the tide, scattered like trees before the wind. We should celebrate; we should drink. There is nothing more to fear.

And they relax, sit back down, drink. And drink. And Goru Da does not drink, but laughs, quietly, stealthily. And says to them: My father says that I am weak, that Totu Chicho will be a better chief, but what does he know? I use my mind. I think. But I still am strong armed. I have skill with a spear! Better than any other man in the village. Give me your spear and I will demonstrate. It is a reasonable request. Give me your spear.

One does; one so drunk he should keep his spear, just to lean on, just to keep from falling over. Goru Da, prince, takes the spear. Long shaft and flint blade, glimmering in the light.

Look, the three of you, look. See that tree? None of you can hit that tree from here. It is too far, and too small, but I can hit it.

They laugh at him. The tree is wide and fat, only a few dozen paces away.

You are drunk, they tell him. The youngest warrior, a mere child, could hit that mark. That is no feat.

Goru Da frowns, becomes angry. Getocka mui. Dodope. You shame me. Liars.

Show me you can strike it first, and when you miss, I will shame you with my skill.

They laugh at him again, but he goads them, and the two who still have their spears rise. They stand beside him, wobbling, peering into the night. Arms back, bodies coiled, surge and release. The spears fly straight and true, bury their points into the trunk.

They look to Goru Da. Cha? See?

But it is they who see. Goru Da, grinning, jerking the shaft of his spear from the body of their brother. Grinning, turning, lunge and punch, lunge and punch. Blood. Only Goru Da remains.

Kapikome tabu hatudime sharundae.

Let us go to a new world, you and I.

Yes, yes.

And Goru Da whistles, a sound like a bird. Shuttered lanterns, tall men. He kicks the gourds, still heavy with wine, into the fire pits. The flames hiss, and there is smoke, and the scent of burning.

***

And still the smoke, the scent of burning, the flicker of firelight. And heat. Roar.

He opens his eyes, reorients to a body that seems shrunken, dense, somehow not his own.

A tongue of flame laps up the drapery covering his window. He can feel its warmth, dry and scorching. He can taste charred wood on his tongue. For some time, seconds, he’s bewildered, staring at a mirage, at some bizarre dreamscape, then he blinks to clear his vision. But there is no clearing. It is darkness and smoke, rippling orange disaster chasing itself up the walls. Where there is no flame, there is only a roil of black perception, the warped substance of reality.

Ray breathes, chokes. Time to move.

He thinks like a soldier, old patterns that feel rusty. Someone is trying to kill him. What does he need? Clothes, and the ones from yesterday are in a pile on the floor beside the bed. He finds them by touch where he left them. Ray kicks his legs into his trousers, grabs his boots, just as the bedroom door–what he assumes to be the door given his sense of the room’s geography–explodes in a shower of wood and flaming splinters. The fire from the hall races into his bedroom, red at the tip, blue and green iridescence at the base. It darts along the carpet as though it’s chasing him, seeking him out. Chasing a trail of accelerant.

Ray springs out of bed. More smoke boiling in from the hall; it occludes even the flame tattering the curtains. He sucks in a breath that is mostly smoke, that tastes like brimstone on his tongue. His body tells him to gasp, to gag, to clear his lungs. Get out.

In a minute. Just give it a minute!

Step, step. Head down and eyes squeezed to slits, but the smoke and heat are invasive. They sting his pupils; his eyes water, so that he feels like he’s crying, mourning a loss he doesn’t understand. Arms out in front, reaching, reaching. His fingers touch the smooth side of the wardrobe. It radiates heat. The lacquered veneer has begun to crack and bubble, curling up from the frame like desiccated skin. Inside, on the floor, his load harness, cool straps and comforting weight. He feels that, even if his other senses have been taken away; the comforting weight of his pistol swinging in its holster at the bottom of the loop, as irrevocable as a pendulum. But there’s more, and he has to scrounge for it, back in the recesses of the cabinet, where he hid it from anyone who might come looking for such a thing, the enclosed cube of Nomar’s secure storage compartment containing ring and shed, sprouting sensor wires from the top like snakes from the head of Medusa.

Then it’s just following the burning tendril to the window, trying not to boil, imagining that the fire has had a good head start downstairs. Everything below him is a shimmering ember, living and breathing flame. That would be his luck, to dick around, make it to the window just in time for the floor to give way and plunge him into a pit of perfect grilling charcoal.

Still, he’s careful. He doesn’t throw himself through the glass on the prayer that he won’t plunge badly, land wrong, break his arms or legs or neck. He expects someone to be out there, waiting for him. Daring him to survive this.

He lifts the window casement open. Bits of flaming cloth from the drapes drift down on him, extinguish on his shoulders. But the window is open, and for just an instant, he feels the cool night air on his skin, takes half a breath, sites and measures his surroundings. But smoke likes fresh air, too. The cloud of darkness shrieks behind him, surges forward and around, shoves through the opening.

Harness over his shoulder, boots clenched between his teeth, Ray lea.s out and takes hold of the tree branch nearest to him from the great oak that scratches at the walls like rats all night long. It’s thick, as wide around as his thigh. He scrambles out the window and into the screen of foliage, then deeper in until he’s got his arms wrapped around the trunk. Where he can breathe again, where he can squeeze his eyes together until his tears wash the sting and smoke away.

Then it’s down and down, plodding through a dense array of limbs and branches, climbing in the dark, or unclimbing, he supposes. Something he hasn’t done since he was a kid, and even then he never unclimbed a tree unless there was a full moon to light his way.

But eventually, after an eternity of false starts and testing limbs that don’t quite bear his weight, after the tree has succumbed in its upper regions to the temptation of fire, he drops the final three meters to the ground. Crouch, duck, scan, sprint. In case whoever it was that decided to burn him out had the foresight to set up on the hill with a rifle and a decent sniper’s scope.

Doesn’t happen, of course. There’s no kick of dirt, no puff of supersonic metal furrowing into the ground at his feet. Because this was an amateur attempt, a bumbling stab at assassination. Any kid with a can of primer and a match can torch somebody’s house while they’re sleeping. That pisses him off more than anything else. It was such a poor effort.

Ray drifts away from the cottage, glances back over his shoulder to see it completely engulfed in flame now. He puts a hundred meters between them, then stops, sits on the ground and puts on his boots. It’s only a few moments later that the lights at the manor house begin to flick on, one by one. Shouts out the window, then a low, wailing alarm.

Fire! Fire!

And he watches them come, Dag Maoudi domestics, pale faced Trust children, spilling out of the manor house like anxious ants, dashing toward him, morbid with curiosity. High up on the third floor, there is a balcony, and a pair of french doors. In the doorway is a light, and illuminated there is Juliet Whiston, bound to her chair, lace shawl across her shoulders. She peers at the scene, sees him seated in the grass, waves at him a frail, translucent hand.

Ray waves back.

Behind him, knowing, though he can’t see it, the shooting flame and black smoke climb, climb…into the form and figure of an immense being; the image of a shed whose trunk is darkness, whose limbs are flame, who lifts his head to the immeasurable sky and howls with laughter, with glee that sounds like devoured lumber, falling stones and the shatter of dreams.

***

Within minutes, there are firefighting tankers plowing through the gates, flattening the lawn beneath their heavy tire treads and crunching down the pebble paths. Water cannons blast the skeletal remains of the guest cottage, their operators concerned more with containment than salvaging the structure. The open gates beckon the press to follow, and then there are Eyelenses fluttering over the scene, colliding with one another like drunken butterflies. Wide angle shots of the blaze; zooms on Ray, on individual firemen. When they come within reach, Ray snaps out his hand, plucks them out of the air like dandelions from a summer lawn, and grinds them beneath his heel. And like dandelions, no matter how many he crushes, there are always more.

The camera operators, at least, are keen enough to steer clear of him. They keep their compads and recording devices out of his face.

Floodlights directed from the house wash the lawn in a sterile, white glare. Long shadows, thin and angular, pace the grass. The residents of the Whiston household stand in clumps, milling about, shaking their heads. It’s mostly just gawking now–a carnival of activity and shouts and humming machinery.

Ray just watches, standing apart, lips drawn into a tight, pale line. In the shadows cast by a grand oak, well off the trodden path, Emma clings to him, still in her satin nightgown, standing in bare feet. She shivers and presses her head against his chest despite the fact that he is covered in sweat and black ash and grime. He places an arm around her shoulder.

“You could have been killed,” she says. Not scared for him, but angry.

“I wasn’t,” he responds. But only because it was a poor attempt. Because whoever wanted him dead was a coward.

A coward who wanted to kill him for the things he has seen.

But Emma doesn’t need to hear that; she needs only the reminder that he escaped. A few scant minutes ago, before the circus began, she had come running down the path, the crest of the Whiston extended family wave, her mouth open as if she would scream, hands splayed, panic in her eyes. She stopped near him, but he was invisible in the dark where he stood, well off the path and its sniper friendly marker lights. He spoke her name over the clamor of voices, of shouts charging in behind her, and somehow she heard him. Leapt at him, smothered him, hasn’t released him since.

“What happened?” she asks.

“That’s what I would like to know.”

Ray recognizes the voice at once, so he doesn’t bother to turn around.

“I assume you’re going to ask me to write my equipment loan off to you as a loss, Commander.” Colonel Ritchie stands at his shoulder, watching the flames gutter. He looks as though he dressed almost as hastily as Ray did. Out of uniform, shirt untucked, hair bristling.

“News travels fast,” Ray answers.

“Just being conscientious in my duty to serve the citizens of New Holyoke.” Ritchie sounds grim, almost as angry as Emma. “But you haven’t answered the lady’s question.”

“Someone tried to kill me.”

“Someone.”

“It certainly wasn’t an accident. Whoever it was used a powerful accelerant to get things moving quickly. Just before I made it out, I could see from the color of the flame that it was tracking some chemical trail as it spread. I’d guess dotopylene.”

Clumsy, yet anonymous. Not a traditional fire-bombing caliber accelerant, because it is older, slower burning than cutting edge terrorist materials. Dotopylene is also ubiquitous on colony worlds, a diesel fuel surrogate that can be manufactured at small cost in standard laboratories in far flung places where shipping fuel becomes cost-prohibitive and the raw materials for traditional fossil fuels don’t exist.

“You’re thinking Lilaikens? Seems somewhat low-tech for intergalactic terrorists.”

They’ve had this conversation, and Ritchie is mocking him, though he has the good graces not to grin and roll his eyes.

“No.”

Ritchie lifts his eyebrows, surprised. “No?”

“It was Frederick Whiston.” He doesn’t elaborate. Nothing he could say to the EED Colonel would be believed, and if it was believed, nothing could be proved. Best to just let the accusation stand.

Ritchie is silent for a long time, like he’s been punched in the gut, been left as breathless as a corpse. But he recovers quickly enough, grins in that sour and aggravated way the military teaches lieutenants to do it in Officer Candidate School. The grin of a man who suspects he has just become the pivot man in a circle jerk and is going to have to make the best of his promotion.

He says: “Well, at least you’re keeping an open mind about it.”

“Ray?” Emma, stunned, imagining she has heard him wrong. If he was wearing a shirt, she’d probably have balled her fists in it.

He ignores her for now. “Are you going to be investigating this case, Colonel?”

“Arson? God, no. There are local authorities in place for that sort of thing.”

“What about the attempted murder?”

“When the fire investigator determines whether or not it was, in fact, arson, it’ll be turned over to Security.”

Ray shrugs. It was what he expected. “Then it really doesn’t matter who did it.”

An Eyelens flutters near, pauses for a shot of Ritchie and Ray standing together, telescopes on Emma looking tragic and demure in her nightgown. Ritchie waits for it to pass on.

“Would you care to explain that indictment of our legal apparatus, Commander, for my personal illumination if for nothing else?”

“Frederick Whiston tried to kill me. No one on New Holyoke associated with the colonial government is going to do anything about it. I consider the fact that you even ask me to explain it insulting, Colonel.”

“Ray?” Emma again, plaintive.

“I don’t mean to be insulting, but it should be sufficiently clear to you in this environment and this political situation that no one is going to jump on your bandwagon just because you make the claim that he tried to whack you. Not without some sort of proof,” Ritchie says.

“That’s why I want you to arrest him.”

“Me?”

“You. EED. On charges of murder, attempted murder and conspiracy to commit terrorism and mass death. Something to lock him down for a while until I can get some work done.”

Ritchie stiffens, sputtering and livid. “Now hold on–”

Outrage is to be expected. Ray hasn’t given him any more reason to believe these things than he did the first time. “You can detain him on those charges, or you can take him into protective custody to keep me from killing him. I don’t care what you call it, Colonel, but I want him locked up.”

“Ray, no!”

He can’t avoid her any longer. Emma tries to wriggle away from him, protesting, but he keeps his arm around her shoulder, a firm grip so she can’t escape. This is his fault, an explanation that is long overdue and a less than optimal situation in which to offer it to her. Still, he’s feeling more murderous than guilty at the moment. It makes him harsh in a way he can’t mitigate, though she is the last person who deserves such things from him.

“Yes, Emma. He murdered Micah. He tried to kill me tonight because I know he did it. And I’m convinced he was involved in the attack on Paraclete. I know this, Emma. I investigated him before the attack, remember? We had all the data we needed, and we were going to arrest him the next morning. That may have been why Paraclete was destroyed. It’s why he tried to kill me again tonight. As long as I don’t have any proof, he knows that no one will touch him.”

“Bloody hell,” Ritchie mutters. It sounds like a groan.

Or was it for another reason entirely? Had Frederick Whiston tried to kill him to protect the Dag Maoudi, the summoning of the mhuruk-a, all of the secret things happening in that chamber beneath the manor? Because he knew about them, had told Ray as much. The Dag Maoudi had taught him all about killing children to harness the shed. But if that was true, why had he spoken with such clear disdain of the whole process? And what was he doing drunk in the house rather than participating in the ritual in the first place?

Because he was weak. He lacked some critical, essential element that the Dag Maoudi and the Whistons deemed essential. How many times had Ray been told that?

He says, “I’m sorry, Em. I am. I should have told you earlier, before things got this far out of hand. But I had to see, you know? I had to come up with something more concrete than just speculation.”

But Emma shakes her head, says nothing. Her entire body tenses, trembles. She’s still trying to get away from him. Ray clutches her with both arms, not letting her squirt away, and she batters at him with her small fists. All he can do is let her. Then she sobs, and collapses, and he’s no longer holding her from fleeing, but just holding her.

“I’m sorry,” he says, quiet, speaking into her hair because she won’t look at him.

Beside him, Ritchie curses, then begins digging through pockets. Ray hears him only peripherally as he speaks into his portable comm. Yes, patch me through to the duty officer. Who is this? Yes, this is Colonel Ritchie, Lieutenant. I need you to contact Sergeant Whitted. Have him gather a detent and transport team and report to the Whiston estate immediately. I know what I just said! Whiston estate, on the double. Tell him to drive the Rhino. I’ve got media all over the place and would really like to avoid a mob scene if at all possible.

Ritchie breaks the connection, jams the comm back into his trousers.

“You had better be right about this, Marlowe. There’s not enough duct tape and bailing wire in the whole universe to fix the damage between EED and New Holyoke if you’re not.”

Ray doesn’t answer, but he hears, and he feels gratitude. Ritchie is taking an impressive risk.

Emma says, “You should have told me.”

Amah told me not to. “It was pointless when I couldn’t prove it. But now he’s changed the rules of the game. He couldn’t leave well enough alone.”

“Of course, you can’t prove it now, either, I imagine,” Ritchie says wearily, like a man who is watching his career collapse. “I can hold him for three days, Marlowe. Three days on your accusation, and purely as a courtesy to your rank. That much is legal, and you’ve obviously pissed somebody off with the progress you’re making in your investigation. That’s all I need to hold him on suspicion, though I can tell you now that we’re going to pay out the ass for it. My pardon to present company, but the Whiston lawyers are going to eat me alive.”

Ray casts a long look at the remains of the cottage, mostly extinguished now. Just a smoking ruin. “When the Port Authority obtains the data core from Paraclete, you’ll have all the documentation you want.”

“And, as I just said, right now I’m just going on your word.” His tone, slightly falsetto, suggests that this is the worst possible scenario he can envision.

“Sounds like a good reason for you to make sure PA shares the complete data core structure with you. It could be embarrassing otherwise.”

“Do not fuck me on this, Marlowe.”

Ritchie can brood and rant all he wants. The point is moot, proven in Ray’s mind if not on paper. So he is not surprised when Sergeant Whitted reports within the half hour that Frederick Whiston has apparently fled the scene.

***

Friday morning. The first day of the Dao Maed Vitouri.

Sunlight seeps through the blinds in the room Ray has been given inside the manor house. A room on the ground floor, buried in the warren of switchbacks and odd hallways, away from the bustle and activity of the household. A quiet place, he has been told, where he can recover from the terrors of the night. More likely, an out of the way place, where he can get lost just trying to find the bathroom and wander the empty corridors and silent rooms until he dies of starvation.

He doesn’t lie in bed, despite the fact that he really hasn’t slept. He finds fresh clothes outside his door, neatly folded and stacked on top of an otherwise pointless baroque style table. His size, but the style is a bit more flamboyant than he would normally prefer. Shiny, and not enough pockets. In his mind, he can hear Jagiri laughing as the takes them back inside and changes. The thought itself makes him feel ill. Fresh from a night of murdering Trust children in some bizarre Passion Play recreation, Jagiri Oh-Kar still has time and mental clarity to think about procuring a suitable outfit for the Whiston guest. Despite his shower before going to bed and the fresh clothing against his skin, he still smells of smoke. His nostrils are filled with the scent of burning, the way he remembers smelling after weekender Boy Scout camping trips in early summer after two days spent crowded around hissing campfires.

Instead of wandering hallways that all look alike, Ray climbs out the window, circles around the house and enters again through the front door. He makes his way down to the comm hub and calls EED. He isn’t surprised to reach Colonel Ritchie, who sounds weary and depressed, and is even less surprised that EED has so far had no luck apprehending Frederick Whiston. A man with Freddy’s connections and financial backing on a world as thinly populated as New H would be difficult to track down. Maybe even impossible, though Ritchie has his people scouring the city all the transportation routes. At least as much as the planetside skeleton crew can be said to scour anything.

These failures disturb Ritchie deeply, like personal indictments. But Ray isn’t worried. EED has locked down all the shuttles to the Port Authority station and is rigorously scanning all high altitude flights. No one is going to get off planet without a great deal of trouble or a fortunate series of bribes. Which means that Freddy is confined to New Holyoke, and Ray is almost certain he will be back in the city before too long, maybe a matter of days. Freddy is too stupid to believe in anything other than his personal and familial invulnerability, and too self-absorbed and sycophant oriented to survive outside of society for very long.

Ray is content with the inevitability of this scenario. Whether by exile or detention, Freddy is out of his hair, which was all Ray wanted in the first place. He has other demands on his attention at this moment in time.

Afterward, he wanders down to the wreckage of the cottage to poke through the ashes and water sodden remains for anything he might be able to salvage. It’s a pointless exercise. The heap of superheated stones and charred timbers still radiates en/ugh heat to hold search attempts at bay, and convince him that nothing of value, none of the EED equipment, remains intact.

And he can’t even talk to Emma. He tries. He needs to assure himself that she’s okay after the long night, and that she’ll be okay as the Dao nears. He stomps back up to the house, through the main hall to the entrance to the central piazza, but the tower door is locked. No one answers the buzz of the comm that is affixed to the wall outside the door, so he bangs on it until a Dag Maoudi girl answers and informs him that Emma is sleeping late. She’s gathering strength for the ordeal of the Dao, a rite spoken of with such reverence and downcast eyeballing that Ray can’t avoid the suspicion he’s supposed to care about such things. All he wants is to see that she’s well.

Because last night he dreamed, and in dreaming, comprehended. Last night he saw, and in seeing, he learned the secret of the Dao. He has all the pieces of the puzzle set out on a table before him. It’s just a matter of putting them together in interlocking and coherent patterns–just a matter of time before the complete picture emerges.

Briefly, he considers just knocking this girl over and barging up the stairs anyway, but he doesn’t. He just nods and grins like a monkey as she closes the door in his face, locks it again. He hasn’t been a real Marine in so long, he’s forgotten how to rationalize such things, to simply act in the pursuit of an objective without adequately considering the consequences. He’s too much of a spook these days, used to doing everything obliquely. Never ask a direct question when a dozen sidelong queries will get you the same answer without revealing anything about your true objective. It’s all so freaking complicated.

Ray is exhausted with complications. Posing as a systems vet on a starship so he can search for Lilaiken infiltrations, only to have them destroy the ship anyway. Chasing after a murder suspect, taking weeks to gather data in widdershins fashion, under deep cover, only to have the suspect escape arrest once, twice, God knows how many times in the future. Convincing Colonel Ritchie that Kilgore and Rodriguez were Lilaiken spies because he’s not supposed to talk about the shed, only to discover that the stolen Solomonic ring is here, in Frederick’s possession. So much of it, maybe all of it, could have been resolved earlier with a little application of old fashioned Marine bluntness. He is not just exhausted by complications, he’s been destroyed by them.

It’s the old joke. A spook can’t even order a decent breakfast after a while, so it goes. The waiter approaches the table and asks something like, What can I get for you, sir? A Smith or Jones can’t just admit that he wants coffee, because to ask straight out for coffee is to hint that he lacks adequate access to coffee related products at this moment in time. It’s an admission of weakness that an entrepreneurial minded waiter could exploit. So he must say something like: I’ve heard that the recent mudslides in Columbia have decimated many of the supracorp industrial farms. That must wreak havoc with your supply chain. To which the astute waiter will respond: I wouldn’t know about that. I don’t do the ordering. That would be management’s job. Ah! So we’ve established that the waiter, the field agent under the direction of the restauranteuring junta, is effectively out of the intelligence loop when it comes to fluctuations in global geo-meteorological or possibly even geo-political status. But certainly you’d be aware if this type of incident resulted in pricing adjustments? You might notice, say, that your other customer contacts seemed to be less likely to order premium Colombian beverages than they typically might, correct? Waiter: Um. If people want coffee, they drink coffee. Thus, the target to be acquired has actually entered the negotiation. But has the waiter dropped the c-bomb as a form of manipulation, i.e. does he want the agent to order coffee because he is aware that the price has changed, or because he has been instructed to suggest the high desirability and reliability of coffee to his contacts. That the waiter is the one who brought up coffee in the first place suggests that he has acquired an understanding of certain dining and diner profiles. He is savvy. Some bioscientists have advanced the argument that coffee is bad for the prostate. In other words, what you’re offering is not without risk. I can live without it. It is not a lack per se, so much as a preference. I might just as likely prefer water or juice, so you don’t have me at a disadvantage where all I require is coffee and that is a desire you can exploit. Waiter: Well, yeah. Maybe after years and years. One cup probably is not going to hurt you. So he wants you to order the coffee, which means he must get something out of the exchange. Maybe just a bigger tip, maybe some arcane sense of satisfaction. But he’ll also tag you as a coffee drinker, which means the next time you come in, he won’t even have to ask. He’ll just bring you coffee. He’ll bring it, you’ll pay for it, whether you actually felt like coffee or not. You’ll be obligated to take it because most of the time you actually do want coffee. It gives him a hold on you.

Complicated means that sometimes you order prune juice when all you want is a cup of joe.

Your lies, their lies, building an edifice of perception, a structure of truth that may have no relation to the reality which it purports to represent. The problem with the oblique approach is that you never know if your data is answers to the questions you asked, or the question they thought you were asking. Meaning devoid of context.

Thomas Malcolm said to him: If you want to know about Juliet Whiston, ask her. She’s the only one who knows the truth, and I think she’s been waiting a long time to find someone who she can trust with her secrets.

If he wants to understand New H, the Whiston family, whatever mad fear it was that caused Emma to flee in the first place, Juliet Whiston is the one with the answers. He has seen the mhuruk-a peering at him through Emma’s eyes, just as it once looked out from Juliet Whiston’s.

He understands in part; the rest is fear, stark and vicious.

He’s not about to let complications stand in his way.

***

Ray climbs up the curved staircase from the main hall, scuffing his feet against white marble stairs that shine in sunlight reflected from the windows of a second floor verandah. There is no sound in the house, it seems, just the echo of his steps, his plodding progress. On the third level, he arrives at a landing which branches off left and right into two separate corridors. He pauses, imagines himself in the night, ash grimed and dirty as Juliet Whiston waves at him from the balcony, then turns to the right. The hall narrows until it’s hardly two meters across, with rosewood panels on the walls, an opulent blue runner of plush carpet down the center over glowing hardwood floors. No artwork up here, just regularly spaced wall fixtures: brass lamps with petite jade colored shades. The effect is one of coziness, a denseness of space verging on suffocation.

He locates Dame Whiston’s room, knocks at the pair of double doors which approximate the location of the window he viewed her in last night. It’s answered by a slight Dag Maoudi girl, reedy and pleasant. She looks up at him with wide, dark eyes, as if his appearance is cause for wonder.

“I know you,” Ray says, before she can speak. “You were on the ship.”

And last night, you were in a chamber underground murdering some of the students you claim to care for. But he shoves those thoughts away. Nothing is gained by revealing what he has seen.

The girl nods. “Yes. Leela. We met in the classroom. The children were very taken with your understanding of Captain Shadow. I’m glad to see you well and whole this morning.”

“Well, it was an exciting evening, that’s for sure, but I managed to come out of it without any significant damage.” He smiles at her, disarming and casual, stifling his urge to hiss, playing the role she expects from him. “I had assumed you’d be working with the Trust, that you’d have additional teaching duties.”

“Oh, I do, Mr. Marlowe, but this is a special day. We don’t teach on the first day of the Dao.”

“But you don’t get the day off, I see.”

A good natured frown. “There are things Amah attends to in preparation for the public events. When she has responsibilities that call her away, I like to sit with Juliet. It’s good for her to see a fresh face every once in a while. She hasn’t received visitors in a great number of years. She gets lonely, I think.”

“I’d like to see her,” Ray says.

Something that strikingly resembles suspicion enters Leela’s expression, a narrowing of the eyes. “Now is perhaps not a good time. Dame Whiston has not been well lately, Mr. Marlowe.”

He remains smiling, feckless, charming. “I noticed that at dinner the other evening.”

“She has not improved since that time. Her mind is not strong these days, almost as weak as her body has become.”

“Really, I won’t trouble her. I just have a few questions I’d like to ask.”

Wary. “About last night, you mean?”

Ray swallows hard, tries to divine her meaning, assumes she must mean the fire. “Last night, yes.”

“I am fairly certain that she doesn’t know where her son has run off to, sir. It would only distress her if you ask.”

“Wow. Not many secrets around this place, are there?”

“No. It was a most terrible thing Mr. Whiston tried to do, but perhaps not surprising. He is a jealous, demanding, cruel man. He does not share his sister’s love for you.”

“Not exactly leaping to his defense, are you?”

Leela casts her eyes at the floor. “Perhaps I’ve spoken out of line, Mr. Marlowe. Forgive me.”

“Hey, there’s nothing to forgive. I don’t disagree with you that he’s a scumbag. I am a little surprised that you’d be so quick to say so.”

Leela peers side to side down the hall, as if to assure herself that they’re alone. She lowers her voice to a whisper, but there’s still a ferocity in it, emotion as sharp and bitter as a shout. “You would not be surprised if you lived in this house, among these people. You haven’t seen the things that I have seen. You don’t know the extent of his corruption.” She stops, reins herself in, makes an effort to smile at him. “But things will be better now, yes? You have come to New Holyoke and to the Grange. You will cast your arms around Miss Whiston and protect her from harm. You will return to this family the glory that has been lost. You are the one that she has been waiting for.”

“That’s what people keep telling me.” This is how they’re going to spin it, then. They’re more than happy to let him remove the shame that is Frederick Whiston. “But I really do need to talk with Juliet, even for just a few minutes. I promise not to wear her out.”

“Just a few minutes?”

“I’ll be gone before you know it.”

A sudden smile, toothy with realization. “You wish to speak with her about Miss Whiston! About Emma.”

Ray winks at her. “Exactly.”

“Then yes, you must come in. It will bring her great joy.”

“I’m a big fan of joy, Leela. But could I speak to her alone, just the two of us?”

“I understand, yes.” Bright eyes, nearly giggling, Leela opens the door for him. “Come in, Mr. Marlowe. I’ll let her know you have arrived, then make my way out.”

He steps inside before she can change her mind, before she can question the assumptions that have gotten him this far. “Thank you.”

She leaves him in the front room, disappearing through a side door. It’s a different sort of space than the others Ray has encountered in the house. Large windows and the french doors leading out to the balcony flood the room with light. The walls are painted in gay and vibrant pastels. Fresh flowers on the tables in delicate, fashionable vases. Photographs on the walls rather than the dour paintings he has come to expect. There are comfortable looking chairs and a sofa in the center of the room, but Ray doesn’t move that way. He looks at the pictures, moving from frame to frame. A very young Juliet Whiston here, smiling and coltish, stunning in her youth. She looks very much like her daughter. More, candid images of Juliet and children, a boy and a girl, Frederick and Emma. The three of them holding hands, bouncing through the gardens, gamboling about the town. Portrait pictures of Emma, then of Frederick, ranging from cutesy infant to gawky teen. Emma in orthodontic apparatus, which Ray finds endlessly amusing. Family images, tableaus of a distant past.

There are no pictures of Charles Whiston.

He has returned to the one of Emma in braces again when the side door opens. Leela wheels Juliet out in her ancient chair. She’s dressed in white linen, with a pink shawl draped over her shoulders and heavy woolen blanket over her legs.

“Now Mr. Marlowe,” she says at once, “you’re going to have to swear to me that you will make no mention of having viewed that image. Emma would be destroyed if she thought you knew. It is in the nature of women to have others believe that they possess their beauty naturally.”

Ray smiles, still playing the affable guest. “Swear on my honor, ma’am. She won’t hear it from me.”

“Come sit with me by the window, young man. Leela says you wish to speak with me.”

He follows them across the room. Leela positions Juliet in the corner beside a table where she can look out over the back lawn and the late blue sky morning. Ray draws up a chair and sits opposite her so they share the same view. Leela places her hand on his shoulder, whispers that she will return in half an hour, but that she will be in the kitchen preparing Juliet’s lunch should he need her. Ray nods, but doesn’t bother to tell her that it would probably take him half an hour just to find the kitchen. Then she’s gone, closing the door behind her, and Ray and Juliet Whiston are alone.

“You had quite an interesting night,” Juliet says. “I will tell you that I was very distressed for some time. I thought you might not make it out at all, which would have been a pity.”

“I’m sorry about the cottage,” Ray replies.

“No one is asking you to apologize. It was a useless old house. You’re the first guest we’ve entertained there in at least a dozen years. Someone will build another one eventually. It’s what the Whistons do. We build structures, large and small, needed or not. Competition, you understand. Every Whiston has in mind the grand line of his forbearers, all leaving a legacy of construction. Building because they have always failed at making.”

Juliet folds her hands in her lap, takes her eyes from the window and fixes them on Ray. “Leela believes you have come to ask me for permission to court my daughter, Mr. Marlowe. But that isn’t why you’re here, is it?”

“I like Emma very much, but no, that isn’t what I want to talk to you about.”

“So coy. You love her. What is this like? I am a batty old woman, but I’m not blind. You love her; she loves you. The rest is just details and complications and social fuddy-duddies looking for an excuse to stick their noses into business that is not theirs.”

She speaks with a pleasant, beaming bitterness. Pain so old it no longer stings, so that only the form of it remains.

“I’m not fooling you at all, am I?”

“I’ve had much more experience at being coy than you have. If you were less clumsy at it, I doubt that I would like you at all. You don’t particularly care if I like you, Mr. Marlowe. I understand that. You don’t care if anyone really likes you. You’re going to do what your heart or your mind tells you is right. You’re not going to allow yourself to be distracted by the wishes and intentions of others. It’s a very honest philosophy. What is the phrase? Down to earth. You and my Frederick are much alike in that way. He recognizes it, I think. That’s probably why he tried to kill you last night.”

She could not have stunned him more if she’d struck him. “You saw him?”

“Of course I saw him–just as I saw you. You entered the house, then you departed. A short time later, he followed. How could I not have seen it? What else do I do but sit and watch?”

“But you didn’t tell anyone?”

“Frederick does what he believes is right. He thought it would be best if you were dead, I suppose. But he’s also not very accomplished at committing crimes of violence. I had faith both in his ineptitude and in your competency, so I thought it best to let events play out as they would. I will admit that I had grave doubts for awhile, when you continually refused to emerge. You must sleep soundly.” Juliet laughs, sounding oddly unaffected. She laughs like a little girl. “But that’s enough about Frederick. You don’t want to talk about him. You want to talk about the Dao.”

Ray sits back, tries to collect his thoughts. “I do, but–”

“But nothing. You knew it was Frederick. I’ve confirmed it for you. Ask something else.”

She’s right. He doesn’t have time to talk about Frederick. “Tell me about Martin Schmidt.”

“Oh, you have been digging, haven’t you? That isn’t a name that’s been spoken in this house in years.”

“Not out loud, at least,” Ray says gently.

Juliet reclines her head against the back of her chair, a deeply private and satisfied smile on her lips. “He was so lovely, my Martin. Of course, we were young. Dreadfully young, really. Who knows what sort of man he would have become? But in his youth, he was splendid and strong. He had a mind that could encompass half the galaxy, always picking at problems, at flaws, at things that didn’t make sense to him. And he was tireless in his pursuit of explanations, of truth behind the facades. I think that’s why Charles hated him so. Martin was everything Charles wanted to be, but was not. And Charles had everything Martin wanted, but couldn’t have.”

“Including you,” Ray says. Just a nudge.

But Juliet snaps her head up, glares at him. “Charles did not have me, not in the way Martin did. Martin I loved. Charles had only his obsession, his desire until afterward.”

“After Martin was murdered.”

“Yes!”

“But you married Charles anyway, even though you knew.”

A look enters Juliet’s eyes, languid and distant. She hunches her shoulders. “Hush now. Shhhh. Hush, Juliet. Some things we do not speak.”

Ray persists, disturbed. “Charles courted you while you were in mourning.”

“Yes, courted.” A dry chuckle, like he has brushed over a secret. “Charles was very vigorous in his courting, though only he would recognize it as such.”

“Tell me.”

“Hush, Juliet.” She shakes her head. With rasping significance, she hisses, “He changed my mind.”

“He thought you were the one, didn’t he? Charles believed it.”

A sudden scowl. “I was not the one. He should have known! But he believed he could make me the one. But they do not make; they only construct. They build in order to hide what they are not.”

“And what it is it that they aren’t, Juliet? What are they hiding?”

“That they aren’t the one. Not in years, decades. Their glory has departed.”

Ray clenches his teeth. “The one what?”

“Hush, hush.”

“Juliet, the one what?”

“Shhhh.” Finger to her lips, face clouded, amused and horrified at once. “Hush.”

Ray backs up, tries to find another way, but aware that he’s losing her. Juliet is wandering down dusty and forgotten tracks he has not imagined. “So you weren’t the one, though Charles believed you were. And after he believed, after he courted you, you became the vessel for the Dao. The vessel, but not the one.” He changed my mind. Sharply, Ray asks, “Is Emma the one?”

“You are the one. Emma is the vessel.”

“Emma has always been the vessel? Since she was born.”

“Yes! She was not constructed. Like you.”

“Like me?”

“You hear, you see, you dream. The mhuruk-a.”

He’s moving in circles, getting no closer, but he’s near enough that he can feel it, a subtext that makes him tremble. “Do you know what the mhuruk-a is, Juliet?”

Juliet claps her hands together, gleeful. “You are a boy full of tricks, aren’t you? Asking questions for which you already know the answer. You’ve spoken to her. I could see that from the moment I met you. You have the mark of one whom she has touched. You are recognized because she knows you. She knows and sees and tastes. She whispers that you are the one so that we know also. She is, and you are, and together you are one.”

“And the Dao,” he demands. “What is the significance of the Dao?”

Juliet cackles at him. “To find the one, of course. To make where one cannot be constructed. But we’ve lost the old ways. Even the Dag Maoudi have forgotten. They taught us to meet the mhuruk-a; they instructed us in the ways of the vessel, but we have lost the essence. We communicate, but do not commune.”

For an instant, Ray remembers. Binary code, a subtle shift in ones and zeroes, an attempt to comprehend the shed.

“He changed your mind,” Ray says.

“They construct what they cannot make. Because they are impatient.”

“What did they do to you, Juliet?”

A whisper, a lowering of the eyes. Juliet Whiston puts her head back. “I was not always so frail, so mad, so broken. But I am not a Whiston by blood, and all of their construction could not make me so. But in many ways, more Whiston than Charles. Ha!”

Male and female vessels. “Charles was weak. Like Frederick.”

“And in trying to make himself strong, he was destroyed.”

“But Emma…Emma is strong.”

“Don’t be afraid for Emma. She is of the blood. She rises.”

Ray hears, swallows hard. “But not like Frederick.”

A devastating, savage smile curls her lips. “Hush.”

Though he prods her, begs her, Juliet Whiston will say no more. By the time Leela returns, she is asleep in her chair.

<– Chapter 17 / Chapter 19 –>

He sleeps for two hours, maybe less. He doesn’t have a clock in his room. He was aware when he finally stumbled into bed that the gray light of dawn was filtering through the windows, but by that time he was so exhausted he didn’t have the energy to do anything but register the fact itself. He has a massive sleep deficit working against him about now, the insidious kind that sneaks up when you think you’re awake, leaves you just a bit muddled and slow. He suspects he isn’t thinking very clearly about the major issues. In fact, he’s not even sure he can name the major issues anymore.

And if it had been Jagiri who had awakened him after those barely two hours, Ray would have happily snapped his neck, dropped the corpse out the window and gone back to bed.

But it’s Emma, which is probably the only thing that saves her.

Emma, in his bedroom, backlit by golden morning sunlight. Casual Emma, which is something he hasn’t really seen before. In jeans and hiking boots and a flannel shirt, with her hair down, like any other frontier settler poking around a farming hab on a weekday morning. She leans across him so her face is only a handful of centimeters from his.

“Wake up, little rosebud,” she says brightly, as sunny and precocious as the morning itself. “Wake up.”

All he can do is blink at her.

“So it’s a myth then, this story that Marines are always up at the crack of dawn? Doing calisthenics and jumping jacks and plotting the best way to kill and rape and pillage? You’re really just a bunch of big sleepyheads.”

He groans. Distinct déjà vu. His mom used to play this game. “I was up at the crack of dawn, thank you.”

“You were?”

“Yes. On the understanding that fashionable socialites made it a point of etiquette or reputation never to rise before noon.”

“We should work on our communication skills,” Emma says. She begins to fold back the blankets in a sturdy, businesslike fashion. She doesn’t ask him if he’s dressed beneath all that linen. She probably doesn’t ask on purpose, given the events of last night. It would satisfy some feminine sense of fair play if he wasn’t, he suspects. “We have a big day ahead, in case you’ve forgotten. Jagiri has gone to warm up the car and pull it around. I think Amah wants him to play escort for the sake of propriety. But I’ve made him promise he’s just going to bring the car and then scamper out of sight for the rest of day.”

It takes him longer than it should to sort out what she means, but he eventually he remembers. He’s supposed to get the grand tour. Mother’s orders. Bah!

“Oh! You slept in your clothes.”

“I worked last night.”

She pokes him with her finger until he rolls out of bed. “Top secret, I suppose?”

On his feet, smoothing out the rumbles in his clothing, Ray arches an eyebrow at her. “Decorating.”

Emma turns and studies his clutter of terminals, chipboards, equipment. Pieces of Nomar are strewn across the desk surface in front of the diagnostic machine. He’s unrecognizable like this, a mutilated corpse.

“Amah will come after you with a pitchfork if you scratch any of the furniture. I’m giving you fair warning.” She smiles at him, teasing. “It took you all night to network your computing hub?”

She goes back to what she was doing, which is making the bed he has just climbed out of. It is a startlingly domestic moment. Ray is tempted to cringe.

“I had some problems with Nomar. They couldn’t really wait.”

“I haven’t seen him this morning.” God, she’s actually fluffing his pillows! Ray ducks into bathroom, unable to watch her anymore. “It went well, I hope.”

I had to blow his head off. It’s what he wants to say, because he needs to share it with someone. He’d like to share it with her, but there’s this domestic thing going on between them that he doesn’t understand. It would be like thumbing through a porn magazine with his mother.

Instead, he just tells her through the wall that it didn’t and leaves it at that.

But she doesn’t. He’s scrubbing the sleep out of his eyes in front of the mirror, trying to decide if he needs to take the obligatory morning piss just yet. Emma pokes her head inside the bathroom door, looks at him in the mirror. Like it’s the most natural thing in the world, to share a bathroom with an almost complete stranger first thing in the morning.

“I’m sorry, Ray,” she says. She looks sorry. Her lower lip curls out like a teardrop. “I know you were fond of him. Maybe someone at EED can–”

He just shakes his head. Shakes it hard; it probably looks to her like he’s snapping at her, but he’s really just hoping to dislodge the goggling look of horror he’s still wearing from having her barge into his ablutionary space.

Seriously, what if he had been pissing? Would that have stopped her? He needs to examine the bathroom door a little more closely. To see if it has a lock, just for future reference.

“I’ll lay out some fresh clothes for you,” Emma says finally.

“No, don’t.” Please. That would be completely too much. Really. “I’d prefer to pick out my own clothes.”

“Then I’ll run down and make you some breakfast.” She ducks out of the doorway.

Any moment now, he’s going to start screaming. More than likely continue screaming until they lock him up for his own protection.

“Emma?”

Pops back, like she was just waiting for him to call. “Yes?”

He turns, chewing his lip. “I love you desperately, but you are really freaking me out.”

“You don’t want breakfast?”

“I don’t want you to fix me breakfast. I don’t want you to lay my clothes out for me. You just made my bed, for Christ’s sake.”

“But…” She wrinkles her brow, parsing complaints that seem to have no meaning. “I thought you’d like that.”

And it hits him, the dreaded flash of inspiration, of understanding. Ugh. He concentrates on ratcheting down his Marine bluntness. It’s roughly the equivalent of taking his autonomic biological systems off-line.

These types of situations are, once again, the main reason men have historically paid for sex. Business transaction sex is so less complicated.

Ray grimaces at her