“Divinity was granted to the first five who had contributed most to humanity’s survival after the tutorial closed. Aurelia embraced hers publicly. The others did not. What the others did with theirs is documented only in family records.”— System Mechanics: An Unauthorized Analysis
The cathedral doors were nine meters tall.
They opened inward, two enormous panels of dark wood with iron banding meant to evoke a period of Earth 1.0 European history I could not identify, and beyond them the nave opened up.
The first thing I registered was the smell. Incense, definitely. Or the design committee’s preferred imitation of it, layered with smoke from real candles.
The second thing was the lighting.
Stained glass ran along both sides of the nave in tall lancet windows, each depicting a scene from Aurelia’s tutorial. The windows were lit from outside by installation lighting that approximated late evening sun, and the colored light fell across the stone floor in long patches as the installation equipment cycled.
Above the windows, the vaulted ceiling rose into ribbed arches that disappeared into the deeper dark, and the architecture managed, despite knowing better, to make me look up.
Guests lined the side aisles with drinks in hand, dressed in formal attire. A low orchestra played from a raised platform where the altar would have been; the choir loft above them had been repurposed as a balcony for guests who wanted to look down on the room.
“Look at me,” she whispered. “Not at them.”
“I am looking at you,” I whispered back.
“You are looking at the windows.”
“Oh,” I suppressed a giggle and turned to her. I hadn’t noticed it before, but she had just a hint of glitter under her eyes. “Cute,” whispered, and I caught myself, horrified. “I mean… uh, the windows here are exceptional.”
“Good.” She squeezed my arm once. “Two ceremonies tonight. The bishop will speak first, then the processional, and after the processional, the dancing begins. Until then, we mingle. I will lead. If anyone asks, you are my guest. If anyone presses, you are a guest from outside the academic network. You do not need to volunteer anything else.”
“Outside the academic network,” I nodded, and then I slowed. “Hey! That’s corpo speak for someone—”
“Yes. You wear work clothes, they will accept it.” I tried to give her a wounded look, but she was immune to it thanks to training from Alice.
The room reorganized itself around Cecilia.
The first greeting was Mrs. Tohra, who held a glass of something pale and a small leather binder. Cecilia paused at her elbow for the length of three sentences: “Mrs. Tohra, the windows are extraordinary tonight; my mother is at the executive table if you have not seen her; have you met Inara—she is just back from Luna.” Mrs. Tohra was still forming a response when Cecilia’s shoulder rotated by perhaps five degrees and the conversation closed without either of them seeming to close it.
The second was a thin man in deep grey with a Syntavelli pin at his collar, and he smiled on seeing me, forming a question. She did not give him the chance. “Mr. Vavari, good evening. Mother sends her regards from the executive table. The Jeup heir is here this evening—I believe Mother has plans to introduce him to several of you before the speech.”
The Jeup heir was the magic word. Mr. Vavari’s expression rearranged itself politely; he bowed, he turned, and we kept moving.
Somewhere between the third greeting and the fourth, I caught Alice across the room.
She was beside a lantern-lit pillar; the heir positioned for maximum face-time. He was talking. She was doing the receptive, engaged face. Her eyes found mine over his shoulder.
Then her eyes did that thing. The thing was theatrical. Round, pleading, send Cecilia, send anyone, send the building’s structural failure, please. The heir kept talking and did not notice the eye-language being deployed perhaps thirty centimeters from his ear.
Cecilia, without turning her head, gave the smallest possible shake of no.
Alice’s face collapsed into the betrayal of a sister wronged for life. Cecilia’s shoulder rotated, and we moved on as I followed. Cecilia, evidently, was perfectly willing to let Alice suffer for the comic timing.
A fourth greeting passed. A fifth. Somewhere in the fifth, an older woman with white hair piled high and a brooch at her throat looked at me for one second too long, and said, “Dear, who is your young man?”, and I felt the conversation tilt.
Cecilia did not tilt. “Mrs. Olsan, this is my guest for the evening, from outside the academic network. The cathedral is at its best this season; I hope you have had time to see the southern lancet.” Mrs. Olsan’s gaze stayed on me a half-second longer, but Cecilia’s shoulder rotated, and the moment closed.
We were six greetings deep when the orchestra’s tone shifted, and Cecilia’s hand pressed once at my back. We turned toward the nave.
The pews were warm wood and cold stone, and Sarisol’s mono had not been built for cold stone. I shifted by half an inch as we settled, and Cecilia’s hand found the small of my back and pressed once, and I stopped shifting.
The Bishop reached the lectern as the orchestra dropped off. “My children. We gather tonight in a season the Goddess foresaw and grieved.”
The stylus sat against my ribs through the inner pocket. I had checked it twice in the limo and once during the mingling, and I would not check it again, because that was how operatives ended up in cells.
“Our healers have been called to places we did not expect, to the people the Zerakai incursions reached. This is not the work our Goddess wanted for us. She has said so. She says so still.”
Alice was three rows ahead on the Bishop’s side, the Jeup heir beside her. The fire-glyphs on her dress had banked themselves for the speech; the dress read as black, mostly, only the faint red along the hem. She did not turn around. Cecilia had been clear about that, apparently.
“From the seventh wave of the tutorial she taught a different lesson.”
I looked at the window. Stained glass, the installed late-evening sun, Aurelia between two crowds. The composition was familiar in the textbook way.
“You will remember the story. Syntavelli and Palistra had stood shoulder to shoulder through the sixth wave, and the victory had been theirs to share. The reward of that victory passed through Palistra’s hands alone, and what was owed to others was not given. Syntavelli withdrew. The alliance fractured. The seventh wave approached, and humanity faced it short two of its founders.”
The pew rustled, the smallest collective reaction along the row.
“Our Goddess had been cheated, too. By the language of contracts, she had every right to stand apart. She did not. She walked between the two camps, and she spoke to each, and by the time the seventh wave struck, Syntavelli and Palistra stood again upon a single line. Humanity survived because our Goddess chose not to be owed.”
A few older guests near the front nodded slowly at a sermon they had heard before.
“This is what she leaves us in this season.”
I lost the next minute. When I came back, the Bishop had reached the closing. “May she find you generous to those who do not deserve it. May she find you faithful.”
The Bishop closed his eyes for a moment, and when he opened them, his hands lifted in the blessing position. “May the Goddess bless every soul gathered tonight. May her eye see you, and her hand find you.”
Something descended.
It came down through the vaulted ceiling and through the air above the pews as if the air were not in the way, and it was warmth. The warmth touched the crown of my head and settled into me, and—
[Your Kallum bloodline canceled “Eye of the Goddess” blessing]
The warmth left me as quickly as it had arrived, and the place in my chest went cold.
My pulse climbed.
I turned to Cecilia.
She was smiling. The warmth was still in her. I could see it sitting under the line of her collarbone. She did not seem to find any of this remarkable. “This is a small blessing,” she said. “But welcomed.”
I gulped, and the gulp made a small sound that the people in the row behind me probably heard. I let out a sigh that was longer than I would have liked.
Wait. Wait, wait, wait.
I knew about divinity. Anyone who had taken a comprehensive History of the System Apocalypse class knew about divinity. After the tutorial closed, the System had granted something it called divinity to the five individuals who had contributed most to humanity’s survival. Aurelia first. Palistra a close second. Midorikawa third. John Kallum fourth. Leyla Najjar fifth.
Aurelia was the only one who had embraced it openly. The others had buried it, repurposed it, or, in John Kallum’s case, written it into a Handbook addendum and stopped talking about it.
In our household, bloodline had been a marketing word. The Kallum bloodline carries the legacy of John’s vision. I had been hearing the phrase since I was old enough to walk, and I had filed it under marketing, or good PR, as Natalya would say.
Now my bloodline had canceled a blessing on my body without consulting me.
It was not marketing.
I would file that for later. The processional was about to start, and I forced my eyes off Cecilia’s collarbone and onto the front of the nave and tried to focus.
The orchestra began the recessional.
The processional formed at the front of the nave with no apparent signal.
A staff-bearer stepped first into the central aisle: a young woman in white, the goddess’s staff replicated at half-scale, polished wood with a silver-tipped crown. Two lantern-bearers followed, eleven or twelve. Behind them came a reliquary-bearer with something small and gold and bracketed in velvet. The bishop himself walked behind the reliquary.
Three concelebrants in plainer white followed. The choir continued the recessional from the loft, and the music followed the column down the aisle.
The guests rose in order of seniority and joined the procession at the rear.
A third of the way through, between the staff-bearer passing our row and the Bishop reaching the doors, the earpiece woke.
“Good PR.”
Natalya’s voice. The first thing on the channel in like twenty minutes.
“Beautiful. Twelve hundred people stood up in unison because someone crossed a line in the floor. Aurelia knows what it is doing.”
Nobody answered her.
We moved through the rear doors into the long corridor between the cathedral and the ballroom. Lanterns lit the walk, the same ones from the procession now stationed at intervals along the wall. The corridor was wide enough for four people abreast.
The ballroom itself was less aggressively religious than the nave. High ceiling, but a secular high ceiling. Round tables along the perimeter, set for the lighter portion of the evening. A polished floor in the center, large enough for forty pairs without crowding. The orchestra had migrated to a raised platform along the south wall and was already tuning.
I expected Cecilia to find us a table.
She did not find us a table.
She turned to me at the edge of the floor and let her shoulder rotate out of the host’s offer for the first time all evening.
“The first dance is mine.”
I had a sentence ready for this, something along the lines of ‘Alice mentioned you didn’t dance’, but I offered my hand instead. She took it, and we walked onto the floor.
The orchestra began a measured corpo-nuevo. Cecilia’s frame settled into the pattern as if she were settling into a guard position. Hand on my shoulder. Hand in mine. Distance precisely the range the form prescribed.
We began.
The first step was correct. The second step was correct. The third step was correct. I made the first turn, and Cecilia’s weight transferred onto her trailing foot on the half-beat the form called for, and the turn closed without any of the small drift the form forgave in beginners.
It was correct. All of it was correct. And it felt nothing like Alice. She was not dancing the corpo-nuevo. She was performing it as a sword form, and the performance was clean. Too clean, but I kept silent.
Cecilia’s eyes met mine across the breadth between us. “It works?”
“It works.” The orchestra moved into the second figure. Cecilia turned us under my arm, the turn came out textbook perfect, and we re-entered the close position exactly as was expected.
The floor had filled up while I was not paying attention. Forty pairs at a minimum, and Alice was among them.
She was on the diagonal across the floor, the Jeup heir leading her through the same opening figure we had just executed. The fire-glyphs on her dress had come back alive the moment the speech ended, and her dress was now red rippling across black in slow combustion patterns that caught the candlelight and threw it back doubled.
The Jeup heir was leading well enough. She could have led him. She was not.
She caught my eye on her next turn, and her eye-language said, look at me, I am being polite, witness this preem Alice. The heir’s expression hinted he had not yet realized that what he thought was a dance was being scored.
I almost laughed. Cecilia’s hand pressed my shoulder by perhaps a quarter of a millimeter, and I did not laugh.
“You can speak operationally,” Cecilia said. “Natalya is monitoring. The second song closes the welcome cycle, and the room loses interest in tracking who goes where. You leave on the second song’s third bar. The corridor to the east wing is past the southern alcove; the door is unmarked, and during the dancing hours it is not locked.”
I memorized the route while my feet kept making the figure. “And you?”
“I will dance to the second song with whichever substitute my mother has selected.”
The phrasing landed somewhere I had not expected, and we danced to the song’s end.
The last figure was a slow close, three steps in, a quarter-turn, the held bow with the partners’ eyes meeting over the shoulder, and a release. Cecilia executed it precisely. I executed it as well as I could. The orchestra held the final chord, and the pairs broke.
Cecilia let go of my hand.
I had three seconds to wonder what to do next. The chord was still resolving; the pairs were still breaking, and I had begun, in the back of my head, to count the bars of the song that would open the window—
“Got me. Watch out.” Alice’s voice.
I looked across the floor.
Alice was not on the floor.
The pair where she had been was breaking up like the rest, the Jeup heir turning toward a server with a tray of something pale, and the patch of floor where Alice had been thirty seconds ago was empty.
Cecilia’s frame, which had been settling out of the dance and into the host’s offer again, did not finish settling. “Alice?” Cecilia said.
The channel did not answer.
Natalya did a few seconds later. The flat working tone was back.
“Alice is being escorted out of the east corridor. Two security. Aurelia internal. She went to the powder room. The corridor she took to get there is the corridor the toilets are on, and it is the same one your route uses, Dashi.”
My mouth went dry.
“Why?” I said.
“I don’t know. They were watching it—wait.”
The pause was perhaps ten seconds. Ten seconds in which the orchestra began the next song, and the floor refilled.
“They’ve got a netrunner here,” Natalya said.