The Black Lung Captain - Chris Wooding [208]
Take the shot or run! he told himself. But he couldn’t do either. He couldn’t tear his gaze from hers. There was a longing there, he was sure of it. Regret.
I wish this were different, she said to him.
The Manes came into sight, a filthy tide of tooth and nail, and he knew it didn’t matter whether he took the shot or not.
Then something moved. Dropped like a cat from an upper gantry to land right in the path of the Manes. A jumpsuited figure with a dark brown ponytail. She threw back her head and howled. The horde, as one, came to a stop before her.
Jez.
Jez, and yet not Jez.
THE INVITATION—A MOUTHPIECE—THE LAST STAND
ister.
Comrade.
Beloved.
The hurricane of joy that met her almost swept her away. A thousand voices, risen in greeting. At last their discordant song made sense. They were no longer terrifying but wonderful. They were welcoming her. Welcoming her as one of them.
She’d fought the daemon inside her every inch of the way, in those long years since the day of her death. Frightened of the temptation it presented. Terrified of being subsumed. Desperate to keep hold of herself.
But when she saw the Manes break into the engine room of the Storm Dog, when she saw her crew—her friends—standing in the path of that savage fury, she abandoned her resistance at last. This time, it was no hostile invading force that took her against her will. This was a surrender.
Strength surged into her body. Confusion was replaced with clarity of thought. She sprang from the walkway where she’d lingered unnoticed, in a daze, while her friends shot down Grist’s men. And the Manes halted before her.
But these Manes were not the horrors she knew. She saw past skin and muscle and bone to the cascade of harmonics within, a music that could be seen and sensed in all its marvelous subtlety. Each Mane was a symphony unto itself, yet each had movements and passages in common. The daemon that possessed each of them was one entity split among many bodies. That was the uniting force. Otherwise, they were as different as earth and sky. The Manes were human, only more so. So much more that they’d passed beyond the understanding of the beings they once were.
She was still herself. They welcomed her, they wanted her, but it was Jez who bathed in their love. The same Jez she had always been. It was a delight she could never have imagined.
What had she ever been afraid of?
She wanted to speak, but speech was impossibly clumsy. There was no need, anyway. Her thoughts were transparent to them. Yet still she tried, forming words with her mind, because she knew no other way.
Not these, she thought. You must not harm them.
And the Manes knew what she knew. They shared her memories of Frey, of her crew, her time aboard the Ketty Jay. They sensed her gratitude at being given a home when no one else would give her one. They learned how the crew had accepted her, even in the face of their own ignorance and fear of the Manes. They saw the beautiful simplicity of their friendships.
She knew then that they wouldn’t be harmed. Not by any hand here.
And yet, for all this astonishing completeness that she felt, there was greater yet to come. She’d connected with them on the most rudimentary level. The intoxicating sense of kinship and understanding was only a fraction of what she might feel if she took the Invitation wholeheartedly.
The daemon inside her had accepted her surrender but only temporarily. It didn’t want her unwilling. The Invitation was just that: an invitation. It could be refused. It was just that very few ever did, with this heaven of belonging within their grasp. Who, when offered this, would choose the lonely isolation of humanity?
Jez was only partway there. To be a Mane in its fullest sense meant accepting the Invitation. And she knew that there was no returning from that.
They spoke to her without words.
Will you join us?
FREY’S GUN WAS STILL leveled at Grist’s head. Grist’s gun was pressed against Trinica’s, at a considerably closer range. Jez was on the far side of the