But if she wants to watch, I’m hardly going to complain. I turn around under the shower, letting the sweat and crab blood sluice off my skin. When I look back, the green dress is puddled at Meroe’s feet, with nothing beneath but smooth, curving brown skin.
“Sorry,” she says. “I got impatient.”
She pulls her hair loose, and it cascades down to her shoulders in a dark, thick mass. I start to object, then wonder why in the Rot I would do that, and by then she’s kicked free of the dress and stepped into the shower with me. I lean down, just a little, and she kisses me.
“Patience,” I murmur, “can be overrated.”
She laughs, and pulls in tighter, her skin slick against mine, her warm, yielding flesh—
Well. What Jack said.
* * *
I’ve never been married, obviously.
When I was a girl on the streets of the Sixteenth Ward, the older teens would talk about being “hooked.” This, I understood, meant a couple who were rutting on the regular, and had agreed not to do it with anyone else, at least until their partner got locked away by the Ward Guard or turned up bled white in some alley. There wasn’t a lot of room for romance in the Sixteenth, at least not for kids with nothing to sell except their bodies and whatever they could steal.
Point is, I’d never been hooked, or particularly wanted to be. I’d rutted, when I got old enough to feel the need for it, with boys I’d paid for or taken a fancy to at Breda’s tavern. I’d visited a Ghul-touched, an old woman, and suffered her bony fingers to touch me long enough to ward against any unwanted complications, but that was about all the thought I’d given to the consequences. The closest thing I’d had to a long-term relationship had been with Hagan, who’d worked with me as muscle as well as sharing my bed, and that had ended with me killing him to keep him from talking to Kuon Naga’s interrogators. (Not that it made a difference in the end, and don’t think I’m entirely free of guilt on the subject.)
Point is, what I have with Meroe is different. Obviously. But neither she nor I have a lot of experience with being with someone, in the most literal sense of the phrase, and what with the constant threat of being eaten by crabs or torn apart by Prime’s walking corpses we hadn’t gotten much chance to practice. Ever since we came back from the Deeps, the crew has been looking to us for leadership. We’d figured out that we liked kissing and everything that came after, but that was about as far as it went.
But the last few weeks, since we’d left the Harbor, had been … different. It’s just her, me, Zarun, and Jack—and Hagan, if dead people count—alone in all the vastness of Soliton. The others have their own ways of amusing themselves—Jack scavenges for interesting tidbits, like a magpie, and Zarun reads the books he finds among the sacrifices—which has left Meroe and me mostly on our own. No one to lead, no one to take care of, just … living. Just for a while.
It’s weird. But … in a good way. Waking up in the same bed. Eating the same meals. Falling asleep together, and knowing tomorrow will be more of the same.
Until it’s not. And that time is getting closer, which is probably why I can’t sleep.
* * *
For my practice sessions, I picked one of the angels that’s not quite so distressing to look at—no screaming baby faces or ranks of grasping hands. This one is tall, six-legged, and vaguely leonine, with a complex pattern of blocky protrusions surrounding its single crystalline eye. That eye, the heart of the angel’s connection to Soliton, glows a brilliant blue, throwing snaky shadows as the huge thing paces around the control room with its complicated interlocking conduits.
“See?” Hagan says. “You can manage.”
I grit my teeth and bite back a sarcastic rejoinder. I hate being patronized, but after everything that’s happened between us, Hagan of all people has earned a little restraint. He hangs in the air beside me, outlined in pale gray Eddica light that would be invisible to anyone without a connection to the Well of Spirits. I can see gray threads linking his form to the conduits throughout the room, and more threads running back up to the angel. All of Soliton is a single system, a complex construct of Eddica energy. Hagan doesn’t control it, precisely; it’s more like he inhabits it—or haunts it, I suppose—and he’s learned to twist the threads to his own ends.
That’s what he tells me, anyway. Honestly I don’t understand half of what he and Silvoa talked about. Which is something of a problem, actually, since as far as anyone knows I’m the only living Eddica adept—the last Eddicant—which puts the fate of Soliton and the Harbor in my hands. Since I overrode the system at the Harbor and it acknowledged me as the highest authority, I theoretically have the power to make Soliton and its angels do whatever I want. Getting the ship to sail in a particular direction turned out to be easy enough, but controlling the angels is not.
“I’ve always been able to do it when I’m concentrating,” I tell Hagan, trying not to lose my focus on the angel. It keeps walking around in circles, six legs moving smoothly, and I wonder if I am finally getting it. “It’s setting the rotting things up so they keep doing what they’re supposed to be doing that’s the problem.”
Hagan shakes his head, brushing back his long hair. His appearance has changed, become more stylized, as though he no longer bothers to re-create every detail of his living self. He’s more like a sketch of what he was in life, a few bold lines roughing in a face, clothes vague and indistinct. I wonder if he’ll eventually give up on a human form entirely, and what will happen to him when he does.
“I told you,” he says, “it’s all about patterns. You impress the pattern of what you want the angel to do into its mind, like it was a wax tablet you were sketching on with a stylus.”
Patterns. I try to think a pattern at the angel, a simple circle. Keep walking round and round. I feel it respond, and slowly withdraw my control. For a moment, it seems to work, and the thing keeps moving at a steady pace. Then it shifts, one foot coming down awkwardly on the uneven floor. With the next step, it topples over, legs churning mindlessly in place as it lies on its side.
Hagan snorts a laugh, ignoring the death glare I shoot at him. I suppose it’s hard to intimidate a ghost.
“You’re pushing too hard,” he says. “The angels aren’t blank slates. They know how to walk already. You just have to tell them where you want them to go.”
“You just told me to imagine a blank slate!” I protest.
“I didn’t mean—” Hagan looks up. “Never mind. We’ll try again later.”
He disappears, vanishing like a candle flame in a sudden wind. I turn and find Meroe standing in the doorway, watching the fallen angel trying to walk.
“It looks a little bit like a clockwork soldier,” Meroe says. “Do you have those in Kahnzoka? Where you wind the key and it marches around.”
“I’ve seen one,” I say, uncomfortably. There was a time when I’d aspired to be nothing more than a soldier like that, carrying out orders as the boss of the Sixteenth Ward and never thinking about anything but the next job and Tori’s safety. I won’t say I miss that life, but it was … easier.