A woman chuckled somewhere; the chuckle turned into a laugh of childish delight.

Venera made her way around the room’s perimeter in quick sprints, ducking from pedestal to pedestal. It was hard to tell where the laughter was coming from because sounds echoed off the high ceiling. Faintly through the floor she could still hear the noise of battle.

The laugh came again—this time from only a few yards away. Venera rounded a broad pedestal surmounted by some kind of cannon and stopped dead, pistol forgotten in her hand.

A big clockwork mechanism had been shoved off the next pedestal and now lay shattered on the floor. Little wisps of smoke rose from it. The pedestal itself was covered with the remains of a man.

Somebody was kneeling in the gore and viscera that dripped over the edges of the pedestal. It was a woman, completely nude, and she was bathing—no, wallowing—in the blood and slippery things she was hauling out of the man’s torso. She stroked her skin with something, squeezing it as if it were a wet sponge, and gave a little mewl of delight.

Venera raised the pistol and aimed carefully. “Margit! What have you done?”

The former botanist of Liris cocked her head at Venera. She grinned, holding up two crimson hands.

“Don’t you get it?” she said. “It’s cherries! Red, red cherries, full and ripe.”

“Wh-who—” Venera had suddenly remembered the commandant’s boast. He had found a hideous death for Garth, he’d said. She stepped forward, staring past a haze of nausea at the few scraps of clothing she could recognize. Those boots—they were Sacrus army issue.

“They trusted me,” said Margit as she lowered herself into the sticky mass she was massaging. “These two knew me—so they let me in. When the bombs went off, the wall and door parted a bit—the hinges sprung! I just pushed it open and ran right out of my little room! Nobody there to stop me. So I came here and brought him with me.”

“Brought who?”

Margit raised a hand to point at something lying in the shadows of another pedestal. “The one they’d just given to me. My present.”

“Garth!” Venera ran over to him. He was on his side, unconscious but breathing. His hands were tied behind his back. Venera knelt to undo the knots, putting her pistol down when she decided Margit was too far into her own delusions to notice.

Far gone she might be, but she’d killed at least two men in this room. “You must have ambushed them,” said Venera, making it into a question.

“Oh yes. I was dressed oh so respectably and had my prisoner with me. They were staring out the window, you people were shooting and thrashing about somewhere out of sight and I just popped up there in front of them. ‘Let me in!’ Oh, I looked so scared. As soon as their backs were to me I mowed them down.”

“There were only two?”

Margit clucked reproachfully. “How many people do you put inside a locked vault? Two was overkill, but you see the doors don’t open from the outside. That’s a precaution.” She enunciated the word cheerfully.

Venera slapped Garth lightly; he groaned and mumbled something, batting feebly at her hand.

She looked up at Margit again. “Why come here?”

Margit stood up, dripping. “You know why,” she said, suddenly serious. “For that.” She pointed, straight-armed, at something on the floor.

It was crimson now, but there was no mistaking the cylindrical shape of the key to Candesce. When Venera saw it she gasped and raised the pistol again, cocking it as she tried to haul Garth to his feet with her other hand.

Margit frowned. “Don’t deny me my destiny, Venera. Behold!” She struck one of her poses, throwing her arms out in the spotlight. “You gaze upon the Queen of Candesce!”

“V-Venera?” Garth blinked at her, then focused past her at Margit. “What the—”

“Quickly now, Garth.” She half carried him over to the blood-smeared stones where the key lay. She let go of him and reached to scoop it up, still keeping a bead on Margit.

The botanist simply stood there, awash in light and gore, and watched as Venera and Garth backed away.

She was still watching when they made it to the chamber’s other door and spun the wheel to open it.

16

Venera’s parachute yanked viciously at her shoulders. All the breath drove out of her, the world spun, and then a sublime calm seemed to ease into the world: the savage wind diminished, became gentle, and the roar of gunfire faded. Weight, too, slackened and in moments she found herself come to a stop in dawn-lit air that was crisp but hinted at a warm day to come.

All around her other parachutes had bloomed like night flowers. There were shouts, screaming—but also laughter. Corinne’s people were taking charge; the air below Spyre was their territory. “Catch this rope!” one of them commanded, tossing a length at Venera. She grabbed it, and he began to draw her in.

The knot of people waited a hundred feet from the madly spinning hull of Spyre. Twenty had arrived here in the early morning hours, but more than seventy were leaving. There hadn’t been enough parachutes, but Sacrus had helpfully decorated its corridors with heavy black drapes. Many of these were now held by former prisoners. Having belled with air to brake them, the black squares were now twisting like smoke and were starting to get in the way as people tried to grab one another by wrist, fingertip, or foot.

She pulled herself up Garth’s leg, hooked a hand in his belt, and met him at eye level. “Are you okay?” He still seemed disoriented, and for a moment he just stared back at her.

“Did you come for me?” His voice was hoarse and she didn’t like to think why. There were burn marks on his cheeks and hands and he looked thinner and older than ever.

Venera smoothed the backs of her fingers down the side of his face. “I came for you,” she said, and was surprised to see tears start in his eyes.

“Listen up!” It was the leader of Corinne’s troupe. “We’ve just passed Fin, and I let out the signal flare. In a couple of minutes it’s going to come by again, and they’ll have lowered a net! We’re going to land in that net, all of us. Then we’ll be drawn up into Fin. We need to stick together or people will get left behind.”

“Isn’t Sacrus going to pass us first?” somebody asked.

“Yes. So everybody with a gun get to the top. And unravel those drapes, we can use them to hide behind.”

As Spyre rotated, first Buridan, then Sacrus would go by before Fin came around again. The soldiers of Sacrus had been right on their heels as Venera’s group crowded into the basement. Doubtless they would be bringing heavy machine guns down, or grenades or—it didn’t bear thinking about because there was nothing to be done. For a few seconds at least, Venera and her people were going to be helpless targets.

“Ouch!” said a woman near Venera’s feet. “I—ouch! Hey, ohmigod—” She screamed suddenly, a frantic yelp that grew into a wail.

Venera spun around to look. Dark shapes flickered around the woman’s silhouette, half seen but growing in number. “Piranhawks!” someone shouted.

A second later there were thousands of them, a swirling cloud that completely enveloped the screaming woman. Her cries turned to horrible retching sounds and then stopped. Buzzing wings were everywhere, caressing Venera’s throat and tossing her hair, but so far nothing had bitten her.

Nobody spoke. Nobody moved, and after a minute the cloud of piranhawks began to smear away into the air. They left behind a coiling cloud of black feathers and atomized red, at its heart a horrible thing bereft of blood and flesh.

“Brace yourselves! Here comes the airfall!” Venera looked up in time to see the latticework of girders that supported Buridan Tower flash past. In the next instant a fist of wind hit her.