Reclamation

"I need to speak with Perivar and Iyal," she said to Gov.

"Of course."

The humans had been put in a little room separated from the Embassy proper by one of the membrane thresholds. Aria all but leapt through it and reveled in the sensation of the gel peeling away to let plain, dry air touch her skin. She lifted away the faceplate and rumbled with her tank's straps. Iyal got up and helped her get the weighty thing off. Perivar remained sitting in an overstuffed chair, staring at the wall.

"It went all right, I take it?" said Iyal as she hung Aria's gear on a rack beside the door.

Aria shrugged. "In its way, but I need to leave here, and I need to find Eric Born."

"Good luck," muttered Perivar. "Adu doesn't even know where the Vitae took him." He combed both hands through his hair.

"I need him," said Aria. "I need to get back to the Realm. I need a ship to take me there and once I am there I need someone who can make the Teachers and the Nobles listen."

"I told you," snapped Perivar. "We don't know where he is!"

"And even if we did," said Iyal, "you wouldn't be able to get anywhere near a Vitae encampment."

"You don't think so?" Aria folded her arms. "They want me in there badly. You think they wouldn't take me in if someone offered to hand me over?"

Perivar raised his head slowly. "You haven't got any idea what you're up against."

Aria felt her temper snap. "You have no idea what I know, Skyman! I know your partner is dead and your friend is imprisoned and I know who has done these things. I also know you are sitting there, just sitting there, willing to let these…things…rule the places you and your children and your children's children will have to live in!" She threw up both hands. "What is the matter with you people? You're worse than most of the Notouch! They at least follow the words of the Nameless. You, you just follow the words of a bunch of bloody-handed strangers!"

For a moment, Aria thought Perivar was going to hit her. His fist curled and cocked itself. Iyal didn't even move.

"Let me tell you something, Notouch," he sneered. "I was fighting my battles while you were pissing your diapers!"

Perivar let his hand drop. He looked at the floor, at the ceiling and the walls. Aria said nothing. If he needed to collect himself, let him. Iyal put her hand on his shoulder.

"Assuming we can get them to take the bait," said Iyal, "are you willing to help haul him out of there?"

"Where my cousin's blood has been spilled," Perivar said, "there will always be revolution." He looked up at Iyal. "What about Killian?"

She smiled softly. "He's still at the docks, booking us passage to New Dawn. I'm inclined to go out with a bang."

Perivar squeezed Iyal's hand tightly and nodded to Aria. "Come on. I'm inclined to show the Vitae who they're really up against."

10—The Hundredth Core, Kethran Encampment, 09:46; 12, Core Time

"It is the vigilant of our grandchildren who will find the world we lost. The rest are as doomed as we are."

—Fragment from "The Beginning of the Flight," from the Rhudolant Vitae private history Archives

The right half of Winema's world gleamed. Her witness's camera was calibrated to respond to radiation both above and below the spectrum that her natural eye could detect. Through her right eye, she saw the trace glow from the optic matter, the lusterless patches of traditional solids, the distinctive auras around each of the core inhabitants as they passed her respectfully by.

Through her left eye, she saw the faces and the artworks and the walls that made up the core to the rest of the Vitae that she walked among.

There are two worlds, she was told when the tests determined her memory good enough to allow her to train as a Witness, the constructed world and the chaotic world. It is the eyes of a Witness that bring them together.

The Memory Holding was at the center of the cores, just outside the axis. The Holding's door registered Winema's active camera the way other security systems registered non-Witness retina or fingerprint patterns. The camera's security wires were clones of her nervous system. It was powered by her heart and mind, just like the rest of her body. If she was not the one wearing it, it would not be functioning.

There were technologies that would have allowed a camera to be implanted inside her eye. Her mind could have been altered to act as a recorder. But then she would have no longer been Vitae. She would have been Aunorante Sangh.

The door was a layer of solid that slid away from a layer of optical matter. Winema stepped through the shimmering stuff, causing its minute crystals to ripple through the light curtain that held them in place. No one but Witnesses saw the inside of the Holding.