He had put something in me. A worm in my body. In my body.

Eve.

My brain shivered, turning aside from what had been done to me and fastening on Doreen's daughter, like a shipwreck survivor latching onto a piece of driftwood. She'd been taken to Hell as a little girl. What had Lucifer done to her, to make her so determined to rebel?

Had it hurt? Had it scraped her insides out and made a black hole inside her head?

It bothered me. It bothered me a lot.

If I thought about what he had probably done to Eve — the closest thing to a child I might ever have — then maybe, just maybe, I could get away with not thinking about the violation of my own body.

My body.

Kill him. For Eve. For yourself. It whispered in my ears, tapped at the walls of my mind. Sweet hot flame, the undoing of the world.

"Make him pay," I whispered to the empty bedroom, as the hover ascended sharply. My stomach flipped one more time, and I slid down with my back to the door, my legs sprawled out in front of me, repeating it to myself. I could, if Japh was on my side. I could do this.

There was no way out now. The funny thing was, when I thought about it, there didn't seem like there had ever been any way out.

Chapter 13

There's an old psion joke taken from a Zenmo koan. It goes like this: Before they discovered Chomo Lungma, what was the highest mountain in the world?

The answer, of course, is another Zenmo joke. The one inside your head still is.

Normals don't get it. But pretty much every psion who hears it cracks up. The laughter is bright and unaffected if you're a child, somewhat cynical and world-weary by the time you hit eighteen, and turns knowing when you're older. When you get to the combat-trained psions, the bounty hunters, cops, and government agents — we don't just laugh. We laugh as if our mouths are full of too much bitterness to be contained, because we know it's true. There aren't any geographical features that can stop you. It's the faults, fissures, and peaks inside your own skull that bring you up hard and short.

Chomo Lungma is the mountain's name — Great Mother Mountain. She rises in pleats and tooth-shapes from the rest of the Himalayas, a low thundering bassnote of Power throbbing from her rock and ice. She is more than a mountain. Generations of belief and thought have made her a symbol of endurance and the unconquerable, no matter how many climbers have climbed to her top unaided by hover technology. It's still an act of faith to scale her.

Our hover drifted through a night sky starred with hard points of brilliance, unwashed by any cityglow. The mountains around the Mother are a historical zone in the Freetown Tibet territory, no cities allowed, precious few hovers, the infrequent temples lit by torchlight, oil lamp, and candleflame.

I stared out the porthole, resting my forehead on chill slick plasglass. Hoverwhine boiled through my skull, rattled my back teeth, slid into my bones. Pleated gaps and gullies of stacked stone vibrated like plucked strings under the hover's metal belly. Starlight danced on snow and knife-edged crags. The air was so thin up here it sparkled.

A slim slice of waning moon drifted in the cold uncaring sky, shedding no light.

Japhrimel stepped into the room. I hadn't moved for a long time, watching the shapes of mountains as we circled the Mother of them all.

He shut the door and said nothing, but the mark on my shoulder hadn't stopped its distress-beacon pulsing. I searched the edged gullies and piles of rock below, my eyes not fooled by thin starshine. The mountains were hooded with snow, but it didn't soften their contours. Instead, it laid bare every grasping, razor edge.

My voice surprised me again. "I'm all right."

Another lie. They were coming fast and thick these days. I had always been so proud of keeping my word; I wondered if that pride was about to turn on me, cutting my hands as I tried to use my sorcerous Will. A Necromance uses her voice to bring back the dead; it's why we whisper most of the time.

We know what the spoken word can do.

He was silent for so long I closed my eyes, the darkness behind my lids comfortless. When he finally spoke, it was a bare thread of sound. "I do not think so, my curious."

The bitterness of my reply surprised even me. "I should think up a cute little nickname for you, too, you know." It was something I might have said in Toscano, back when the world had still been on its course, not descended into insanity. I'd thought I was fucked-up then but beginning to heal. I hadn't had any idea of how fucked-up it could get.

A nasty little voice inside my head whispered that maybe I didn't have any idea now, either.

"You could," he finally said. "I would answer."

"You always do." The darkness behind my closed lids made it easier to say. "Somehow."

"I have not been kind to you." The words came out in a rush, as if he'd been sitting on them for a while and just now set them free. "What I have done, I have done with the best of intent. You must believe me."

"Sure." Who the hell else do I have to believe? "Look, Japh, it's okay. You don't have to."

Meaning, I'm not in any position to throw stones when it comes to good intent. Meaning, you came for me, even when you didn't have to. Meaning, someone else hurt me, not you. Meaning other things, too, things I couldn't say. There might have been a time when I could have opened up my mouth and spilled everything, but that time was long gone.

Besides, he probably wouldn't understand anyway even if I could say it. I had been reduced more than once to incoherence by his inability to comprehend the simplest things about me.

I didn't hear him cross the room, but his breath touched my hair. The warmth of him radiated against my back. "We do only what we must." Each word touched my hair like a lover's fingers, raised prickles on my nape. Precious few people got this close to me. "You more than most, I think. May I ask you something?"

Oh, gods. "If you want." The stone lodged in my throat coated itself with ice, froze the words halfway.

He paused. His fingers touched my left shoulder, skating over the fabric of my shirt. My chin dipped, shoulders unstringing, losing their tension.

Maybe I could relax for just a few seconds. I needed it. I was on the knife-edge of psychosis — too much violence, too high an emotional pitch for too long. It was a wonder I hadn't had a psychotic break yet. I just wanted to curl up somewhere and rest, close my eyes and shut out the world.

Trouble was, the world doesn't take too kindly to being shut out.

The hover lifted, gravity turning over underneath my stomach. We were in a holding pattern, drifting quietly over the tallest mountain in the world.

Except the one inside my head, that was. The one standing between me and any semblance of reasonable humanity. I heard Lucas mutter something outside the door, the sound of metal clinking — ammo, probably. Leander's muffled reply was short and terse.

Japhrimel sighed. It was a very human sound, stirring my hair as a soft rustling began. When his arms came around me I didn't pull away, but neither did I lean back into him. His wings unfolded, rippling as they closed around me, heavy and silken. Spice and demon musk freighted the air, carrying the indefinable smell of maleness and the faint tinge of leather and gunpowder that was his, unique.

His wings draped bonelessly, the slice of starshine coming through the porthole closed off as they cocooned us, liquid heat painting my skin. He was always so warm.

A very long time ago I'd read a treatise on Greater Flight demons and their wings. It is a tremendous show of vulnerability, almost submission, for a demon of Japhrimel's class to close his wings around another being. The writer of the treatise — a post-Awakening Magi whose shadowjournal had been more difficult than most to decipher — hadn't used the word trust, but I'd inferred it anyway, fully aware of imputing human emotions to something… not human.