-Walt Whitman, Barge Through the River Brightly Quiet claimed the air for a long minute after Nixon's sacrifice. Then Lallowe stepped forward, peered down at the hole at the center of the pit, and bared her teeth.

"May you find a pleasant waking, little unboy, Thank you for clearing my compet.i.tion from the board." She lifted an arm and waved her fingers at Sesstri. "And a fine h.e.l.lo to you, baby sister. Welcome to the f.u.c.king family."

Sesstri shuddered but offered no reply. Cooper shuddered too; he could feel Lallowe's sick satisfaction through the blood bond. Spirits of salt and stone and water danced within them, and between them, and beyond.

Asher threw himself toward his besieged daughter but was intercepted by four shadows-in less than an instant, they had snared Asher in a frame of darkness, night and day boiling where they touched. A fifth lich with a shiny brown wig over its shoulder spread its polished fingerbones across Asher's face. He howled, dying a little to feed the vain abomination. His eyes went dark and dry as a corpse, and he sagged in his captors' grip. But his bone-dull skin began to bleach itself brighter, appearing almost to shine.

Across the room, Prama stood her own again a circle of five hissing lich-lords.

"As I was saying." Sesstri sounded dangerous. She recited Messerschmidt from memory now, with a swift efficient voice that gave even Lallowe pause. "According to munic.i.p.al statutes, the building, breathing, and flying rights or any subset thereof may be remanded by royal decree, resulting in immediate expulsion from the City Unspoken and its environs."

Asher could decree nothing but his own death rattle at the hand of his lich captors.

Light rekindled beneath his gray skin as it healed-the grayness flickered like celluloid film, then bleached itself to silver and white before their eyes. If Cooper had stood beneath a hundred flashbulbs, he might shine so bright. Spears of light from bright polyps lined Asher's ribs, and his ragged clothes disintegrated.

Naked, Asher's humanity was dispelled: ropes of muscle, lanky joints, a thatch of darker gray hair surrounding his generative organs-these faded as the scars between his ribs glowed brighter and brighter, pushing cysts of new cells into the puckered wounds, and as the lights under his skin intensified, the reality of Asher's heritage a.s.serted itself. His patrician nose elongated into a regal crest that stretched down below his chin and all the way up past the crown of his skull, and his eyes-flickering still between red and blue and green-blurred together until he gazed out from a single conjoined orb, ensconced within the bony crest that flew up and backward over his skull.

He reached out with one ma.s.sive white-boned hand and grabbed Amba.s.sador Rousseau by the face, as she held him. He squeezed, and silver light shattered her skull. The rest of her fell away like ash and costumery.

His four captors released their grip and backed away, but it was too late. Asher flared his rekindled light, and spears of silver-white brilliance pierced the four, nullifying them.

His resis tance gave the undead swarming Prama pause, and she took the opportunity to flare her own golden light, repulsing the lot of them a short distance, cast out in a circle around her. Father and daughter faced each other and, after nodding, bowed their heads and spread their wing- fins. Light arced above each of them.

From across the room, Prama's gold light and Asher's white light merged into a bridge of light that illuminated everything. All shadows were consumed by light cast by the aesr or reflected from the mirrored sphere around them. All shadows-even those constructed and maintained by necromantic perversion.

For a moment, it seemed to Cooper that every lich within the engine was caught in the flash of a paparazzo's camera. The next instant, their bones collapsed in a hail, ringing off the metal floor, the anti-light that glued them together-their actual medium of existence-was simply banished. Vaporized by pure light generated by two wounded, p.i.s.sed off First People.

Then the bridge of light faltered, and winked out as Asher and Prama gasped, sagging, each merely radiant, rather than blindingly brilliant.

Cooper wanted to exult in triumph, but the Cicatrix's portal was convulsing-first contracting, then pulsing wider than before. Slowly, something began to push through. Something with an elongated, black head- a horned ovoid shape he imagined to be slick with acid blood, tail a mile long, vile. Cooper's ghost finger pulsed in triple-time: his own blood pounding through it; Lallowe's heart beating strong as a boxer in her chest; and the song-to- song countermelody of the vivisistor to its siblings, cl.u.s.tered within the Cicatrix like intentional tumors: brainstem, wrist, heart, womb.

He sensed her considerable bulk and again marveled at how large she'd been able to grow, from the seed of a such a small woman. A subway train of black claws and ozone breath, with no light in her but that of her life- fueled LED tattoos. Cooper could hear the maddened pixies already- they screamed for death inside her vivisistors.

WinterWinterWinter! GiveUsWinteryDeath, GiveUsAirAndDark, WinteryDarkyDeath, PullThePinsFromOurHearts, Cooper-Omphale, AndBleedUsDeadDeadDead!

"What is she?" Cooper asked Lallowe out loud; she didn't need to speak to answer. They were connected by blood and machine now, and he could have overheard her fright-dappled thoughts anyway, had it occurred to him.

She is my mother and my queen and my bane. She calls herself the Cicatrix, the mistress of scars, and she will crack this city like an egg when she arrives.

Then Lallowe Thyu turned on her heel and ran.

Sesstri knelt at the lip of the circular pit where once a G.o.d had been pinioned by the Lash and bled its life into the engine that allowed the mortals of the worlds to achieve everlasting oblivion. An engine to end wakings.

She covered her face in her hands, not at all sure whether she wept for Nixon or because of the lies Almondine had told before she died. They were lies, she knew that much. They had to be. It was true that Sesstri had never known her mother, but she knew the woman had been a fierce soldier, a foreigner, and the only woman her father had ever acknowledged as his equal.

She can't be, just can't. G.o.ds, her belly hurt.

Asher took Sesstri by the wrists and lifted her to her feet. On the far side, Prama hugged her knees and rocked herself back and forth, barely glowing at all.

"She's coming," Cooper pleaded to anyone who cared to listen. Only Purity seemed to hear.

"Can't you stop it?" she asked Cooper, scrubbing her face to warm it.

A sucking sound drew Cooper's eyes to the portal, which tore itself open inch by inch, acrylic blood chasing the etched channels as it dripped onto the floor. Cooper considered the branching, convergent tattoo of circuitry painted in purples and blues and blacks.

Within the portal, a shape began to resolve itself. Like a sketch, the lines that described her face appeared before the face itself resolved in the portal: the eyes of a woman gazing out from beneath a p.r.o.nged helm, a pair of silver lips adorning the plate where her jaw should be.

Sesstri gasped in pain and nearly fell to the floor, sagging in Asher's arms. She clutched her belly.

"What it is?" Asher asked with a voice full of concern.

"Womb magic," Cooper answered. "I've been inside the Cicatrix, and she's not quite woman anymore. I think that she's drawing upon her daughters' bellies to birth herself." He grimaced. "I'm sorry, Sesstri, but it's true."

Blood to blood and back again. He could feel the blood they shared, the women and his coin machine.

The Cicatrix emerged from the pulsing ellipse headfirst, wailing with the effort as her arms slithered out of the ca.n.a.l, ceramic insulator discs mounted atop her shoulders popping audibly; she yawned, gasping for air as she struggled to push her shoulders into the world. Her perfect silver lips stretched wide and wider-and then they dropped down as her mouth plate slid past her throat, and she inhaled through a curtain of jawless meat.

Her horned helm sc.r.a.ped the edges of the portal, which sprayed dark fluids and electrical discharge into the air. One hand remained bare, white skin tweeded with overlapping scars-on the other she wore a wicked gauntlet with slits at the fingertips for her obsidian nails.

The polymerized faerie queen screamed when she saw that Almondine was gone.

Cooper clapped his hands over his ears, Sesstri and Purity following suit as the Cicatrix decanted herself into the world. Her amplified lamentation blared on for too long, her rage and loss venting from artificial lungs that snaked down through her thorax.

"My child! My heir!" In her grief the half-born Cicatrix thrashed with no concern for her own well-being, dashing her half-ton headgear against the metal floor until the entire engine room rang like a bell. Cooper thought she looked like some monstrous mermaid whose fish parts were sea serpent rather than tuna, and synthetic besides, her helm a crown of black coral, overgrown with a drowned beauty.

The half-birthed invader queen fell silent. She raised her torso and reared back, reclining into the cradling support of her polyvinyl serpent's abdomen-still emerging from the portal, her segments dragged along by unnerving, insectile grasper arms- as she a.s.sessed the gathering of her enemies. When her eyes found Cooper, he saw the recognition-she had his scent, surely. His ghost finger itched- blood to blood to blood.

"You." She spread obsidian claws at his face, thin as black ribbons and deadly as mamba fangs. "You are CooperOmphale, the boy who's been inside me. Do you know what we do to intruders in the Court of Scars, man-child?" Her visor retracted halfway, exposing the lower half of her face, and she pulled her quicksilver lips into a grimace. Silver-lipped, eyes hidden behind a crescent of black plastic, corseted in braided aramid fibers, she looked a pop star pirate queen, ready to steal the show and the stadium with fireworks and neurotoxin. Cooper didn't resist the abject terror the Cicatrix inspired.

But abjectly terrified or not, he had to do something. Cooper took a deep breath and extended his shamanic senses-sight beyond the world, sounds beneath the skin. He didn't know just what to expect, but . . .

Well G.o.dd.a.m.n.

Like an earthworm pushing its way out of wet soil, the Cicatrix slithered from one world into another, and where she existed between the worlds, he could feel her. Feel her and . . . reaching out . . . he could grab her body with the hands of his spirit. In the infinitesimal vastness of the non-s.p.a.ce that coc.o.o.ned the worlds, his grip was strong.

"I am the Omphale." He talked just so he could hear his own voice, to lend himself courage through vim and vulgarity. Cooper astonished himself with the clarity of the vision, he could feel her heart beat and the machine whir of the systems that brimmed with power bought by life. She was enormous; before, when he had inhabited her body on accident, he hadn't the presence of mind to appreciate her sheer bulk.

He could feel her pulling herself toward the City Unspoken with frantic speed. And if he tried, if he bore down with his stomach muscles and bit his tongue, he could hold her there.

"Ha!" He laughed aloud. Sesstri flashed him a smile-if he killed her mother she'd have to thank him.

Cooper felt his body vibrating, not too differently from the vibrations of the chains beneath the city-how an airliner or a subway train might feel, urban and elemental and beyond his control . . . except that somehow it was within his control, which he exerted, bringing the freight train faerie queen screeching to an interdimensional halt. Nearly.

"She's still coming. s.h.i.t, she's a long- a.s.s snake elf. Snelf." Cooper ground his teeth, clenched everything, and bore down. He howled through his teeth, red-faced. "Your mother's a snelf!"

"Shut up, t.u.r.d!" Sesstri called, but the Cicatrix opened her quicksilver lips and spoke in a voice that deafened: "My sovereign and core modules exist here, within the Dome, such as it is. Within the boundaries of the City Unspoken. The rest of me is merely luggage." The queen raised one arm and her synthetic skin retracted to show an array of metal warheads. The armament dropped down in a loop of chain, a bandolier three feet long and bristling with quicksilver munitions. At the tip of each silvery warhead shone a lilac LED, and Cooper could hear the screams of vivisistor-pinioned lives within. "I think, Girl- Prince, that I will redecorate the ruins of your palace in a palette of reds. Let us start with the hot red paint inside all of your human slaves."

"No." Cooper and Sesstri said as one.

"You cannot stop me, Omphale, and the Manfrix girl cannot help you." The Cicatrix stroked her ma.s.sive, horned helm with her flesh hand. "My daughters with men are weak."

"You have some fairly demonstrable design flaws," Sesstri said, walking toward the queen. "You are wrong," she spat, "and you will have none of me, Mother."

Sesstri flipped a dagger in her hand, hilt up, and slammed the blade into her belly. She struck low and savage, feeling the edge sc.r.a.pe against her pubic bone, hoping to avoid vitals like the bladder and intestines, to damage only her reproductive organs. She gasped, eyes wide, then twisted the dagger with the last of her focus before folding in half and dropping to the floor.

Cooper felt frozen to the spot with horror as, with a suck of pressure, the pulsing oval clenched shut and vanished, severing the body of the foreign queen as neatly as a guillotine.

Her balance upset, the Cicatrix toppled forward, bracing her fall with her hands and shattering her black rapier nails; with the synthetic muscles anchoring her hips and torso to her wyrm-body severed, their remainder contracted reflexively, squirming like worms from the queen's severed cha.s.sis and spraying brown engine oil across the golden floor. Her warheads clamored against the gold floor, their lights flashing faster now, alternating lilac and emerald green.

She continued dragging herself forward with broken nails, hissing venom and steam from the grill of her perfect silver mouth-until ancillary stabilizers emerged from the segments beneath her torso, pushing the Cicatrix slowly, slowly upright. She twisted her neck, turning her enormous helm this way and that. Something in her head unlatched, and the Cicatrix craned her head forward, sliding a smaller version of her horned war helm out from the larger bulk.

What is this? Cooper thought. Purity cursed.

Like skirts parting at a clever slit, the Cicatrix drew back the lower segments of her exoskeleton and stepped out of the carapace, dainty feet touching the golden floor. One, two, three, four, five, six-six smooth legs, harvested from three fey girl-children, still rubber-boned with youth, whose hips and ankles would obey the torture of machine ch.o.r.eography. Once, twice, thrice the Cicatrix kicked her heels and patted forward, full of doll- like menace. Aluminum petticoats served double duty as cooling fins, hiding the juncture of harvested limbs and mobile cha.s.sis.

She left behind a molted sh.e.l.l still rearing in a Cicatrix- shape: empty horns, hollow carapace, skeletal arm servos. A dragon, an insect, a dancer- the Cicatrix pressed forward. "Try as you like, CooperOmphale," the Cicatrix gloated, skittering with the skin-crawling ululations of a centipede; released from the vast length of her complete exoskeleton, she was fully mobile and terrifying. "I have contingencies for contingencies, and bodies the likes of which you would not believe.

"The chains once buried across and beneath this city serve an even older purpose, for instance." s.h.i.t-your-jeans terrifying. "Oh, Cooper, I'll show you. After I birth the living madness into the worlds, boy, I will fill this city. All it takes is one G.o.d-machine-empress costume change, and I will seize the reins and ride this beast into the suns."

"Oh, f.u.c.k me once in the chimney and twice at the gate," Purity cursed again.

"It's the svarning, isn't it? Somehow . . ."

"She's been drinking it," Cooper said aloud, as he realized it was true. "Holding it back in her crazy bulls.h.i.t magic engineering complex until the perfect time to let the inevitable happen. Then all that sickness will flood out into the metaverse at once, with the city as ground zero."

"I may have made a poor prince"-Asher stepped forward-"but I will not let that happen." He looked like a kind of abstract stone eagle, or perhaps a moth-man made from chalk and bone. Or a beta fish and Apollo. Whatever Asher was, he was not human, no one could mistake that. He was of the First People, vast and unknowable. Except that Cooper knew him. He swore, he did.

Cooper looked to Sesstri, full of questions, who nodded at Asher's transformation, her face filled with sorrow.

BeyondMeNow, Cooper heard her worry-had she known? BeyondAndBroken.

Ex-Prince Asher tackled the Cicatrix without warning, moving faster than the eye as always-now a streak of white light, not bones-and in a trice her enormous head whipped backward, gripped between Asher's shining hands. He ripped cables from her cha.s.sis as he pulled his face close to her own.

"In all these lonely endless worlds I love only two women," he hissed into the grille where her ear should have been, "And you have hurt both of them."

The Cicatrix howled, oil spraying from her torn cabling, but he could not snap her neck.

The Cicatrix threw him over her shoulder, cracking his crest against the floor. "You can't even spell the alloys that replaced my spinal column, Fflaen." She laughed, an autotuned sound that remixed some internal system static into a cruel arpeggio. "Thorn and thorax!" The Cicatrix shook her head, the slender tips of her war helm sending sympathetic impulses to its empty giant twin behind her, which mirrored the movement. Then she began to nod, and the empty carapace nodded as well. Contingencies.

She lifted her inorganic hand, and the gold floor rippled-scrollwork and circuitry like fine lines of filigree lifted themselves from the metal beneath and undulated like rapt snakes. The Cicatrix shrugged, and the metal lines shrugged with her.

"You don't see me, Fflaen, or you would see that I am prepared for anything." The filigree lines wrapped themselves around Asher, lifting him bodily from the floor. Then they began to burrow into his body, all razorthin and right angles. Asher screamed.

"Your little red G.o.ddess thinks she's ruined my fun by opening the Dome and breaking my toy before I could play with it." The Cicatrix pouted. "But why cry, when I can try to fix what you've ruined?" Borne by the wire-thin circuit lines and dripping white blood, Asher's body floated into the center of the spherical engine chamber.

"One of the First People powered this engine for ages beyond counting." She nodded toward the smoldering corpse across the room. "I don't see why you won't do, for a spell."

The queen shuffled her baby legs till she faced her abandoned exoskeleton, concentration in her eyes. She lifted her arms and adjusted her torso until her stance matched the exoskeleton's positioning, and engaged it. She raised her hands and twisted her shoulders, and the exoskeleton mirrored her motions. Twinning herself, the Cicatrix reached up and dragged her now-empty cha.s.sis through the hole in the ceiling.

"With an ordinary machine, of course, this wouldn't be possible," she cooed. The machine's piezoelectric spine bristled with an influx of electricity: rows of teeth, rows of fins. The Cicatrix moaned in pleasure, arching her own spine as well. "Ooh, science."

Cooper panicked. Sesstri was wounded, maybe mortally. Purity had done what she could, and Prama was traumatized and drained almost dry. So Cooper did the only thing he could think of, he threw himself at the Cicatrix's legs and did his best to entangle himself in the childrens' legs that supported her.

The queen bellowed and tried to kick him off, but Cooper refused to let go. She dragged him along the golden floor, and he fought against the legs of young girls. Everything was nightmare. But there were brownies inside the queen-Cooper wondered, could he coax them into suicide, if he promised them freedom instead? Could a pixie powering a vivisistor choose to . . . secede? Cooper held on as the etched floor scrubbed his ruined back, he lied faeries to their deaths, and tore at the flesh of children, anything to stop the Cicatrix from killing Asher, or worse.

You do not obey your queen, he shouted into the systems he could sense, the ones attached to the legs he clutched, you obey a monster who has stolen her shape. As the Cicatrix ground him into the floor, Cooper seduced the creatures-spirits of nature-that maintained her grafted dancing feet.

Amazingly, it worked. One by one her doll legs numbed and blued, as six yellow, orange, and finally red LEDs pulsed across the underside of her abdomen. Cooper could hear the alarms ringing inside the Cicatrix: tissue oxygenation was zero, crucified pixies screaming prophecy and system failure. The stolen legs tore away, soft and spongy.

The Cicatrix howled and whipped her abdomen, shedding the false pelvis and its six seeping stumps. Away flew the corrugated petticoats of her mille-feuille cooling fins, revealing the triangular tail of a trilobite. Cooper rolled away and hit the outer wall of the engine room, knocking his head hard. Asher still floated in midair, transfixed by dozens of gold circuit-wires. Cooper picked himself up, and the Cicatrix shot toward him, clawing at the floor as her short tail propelled her. Then she lifted her head, her shoulders and, impossibly, her insectile lower half.

She levitated. Of course she did. Cooper threw himself at the queen's waist, but she shed her trilobite tail like a cashmere skirt, and Cooper found himself rolling along the floor again, discarded segments squirming against his skin.

This was her last layer, there was no more artifice beneath. Nothing but bone and meat remained below her waist-half a faerie drifted toward him, murder in her eyes. For a woman who'd armored nearly every limb, organ, and orifice in what remained of her original body, it seemed strange and, somehow, ungentlemanly to Cooper for him to see her bare hip sockets-pitted and dry, clearly arthritic, dead.

"Darling, darling, don't protest. She's family!" A merry voice sounded from the stairs below the entrance, and a red-coated Oxnard Terenz-de- Guises appeared, the arm of his lady wife gripped in one bejeweled hand. He raised an eyebrow when he saw his prince, wrapped in gold lace, hanging in midair.

The marchioness hissed at her husband, who let her go with a forbearing smile. "Now, for a girl who kills her papa daily," he said, "you don't sound like a very attentive daughter. Can we try again?"

"Mother?" Lallowe appeared stricken. "Is that you?" It had been so long since her mother had looked like a woman-and now that she did, it felt awful.

"Go away," the Cicatrix coughed. "My failure." She reached out for Cooper's throat.

But Cooper found a reserve of willpower he did not know he had, and closed his eyes against her advance. He held up his hand, the one with the missing finger, and felt the blood moving through his hand into the pinkie that powered Lallowe's vivisistor. Lallowe and the Cicatrix were connected by blood, and he was connected to Lallowe-he could not talk down every fey sprite in every vivisistor, they littered the Cicatrix like tumors- but perhaps he could do something more.

"I am an acme of things accomplish'd, and I an encloser of things to be." Cooper quoted Walt Whitman to his own blood as if his veins contained a spirit with whom he could commune, and he spoke aloud to the cavernous gold room filled with G.o.ds dead and living. As Chesmarul's voice had awed him in the cathedral-forest of her mind, so Cooper's voice thickened the air like soup, then honey, slowing down the apparent pa.s.sage of time for the others. "I celebrate myself, and sing myself/And what I a.s.sume you shall a.s.sume/For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you."

He stole the poetry that unfolded inside his memory, which he wielded like prophecy, and was glad the verses were Walter's. Not that the words themselves mattered, at all-what mattered was the intention to commune with the spirit of his blood, threaded through the ether from hand to finger and back again.

"Have you felt so proud to get at the meaning of poems?" Cooper called out like a braggart, and the Cicatrix froze with a look of horror as his intent caused her kernel to panic. "Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of all poems." Faerie logic cores began their infinite sum failures.

"You shall no longer take things at second or third hand, nor look through the eyes of the dead, nor feed on the spectres in books." Cooper healed Sesstri, who coughed in surprise, soaked through with blood that suddenly no longer seeped from the wound in her gut.

"You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me." Lallowe wrinkled her brow in momentary confusion, as though she'd been smacked. His blood! Cooper's body felt filled with fire-Lallowe did not know it yet, but the link between them no longer flowed both ways. The blood flowed, but any attempt on her part to exploit the connection would be violently rejected.

"You shall listen to all sides and filter them from your self." Light danced across gold as Prama and Asher spread the finlike wing-things that sprouted from their shoulders and lower backs. Asher hung his head in shame; Prama lifted hers higher.

Cooper focused on his pounding heartbeat and the blood that had become so central to the fate of the metaverse. When he seized control of the Cicatrix's vivisistor network, his perception of time slowed as his mind expanded to apprehend the sudden vastness. Nearby, he felt the queen's vivisistors-a cl.u.s.ter of local stars in tight formation. But he felt others, too, far away from the City Unspoken. They pulled at him with enormous gravity, as old and distant as stars in the night sky, spangled across the metaverse. Were they new? Some seemed to flicker awake while he watched.

Cooper refocused on the Cicatrix and the stars comprising the constellation of vivisistors within the queen began to flare up, then fade away. Popping sounds like dying lightbulbs filled his ears, as some of the fey vivisistors began to crack open, incapacitating the Cicatrix's systems and disemboweling the wee faeries who powered them. They went too easily, Cooper thought, trying to remember the next line from "Song of Myself."

"You shall possess the good of the earth and sun, (there are millions of suns left.)" But her little suns were gone. Deprived of power, errors swamping her systems, the Cicatrix collapsed to the floor; the sound of her dry hip sockets splintering against the metal made Cooper wince, even in his trance. Lallowe had tears in her eyes, but did not move.

The length of golden lace that impaled Asher drooped toward the floor, and Prama pulled him down and began the painstaking task of removing the filaments woven through his alien body.

The Cicatrix's laughter sounded like a broken engine. She was running on reserves, dying and in pain. "You've won so many battles," she quavered. "Shattered so many thoughtful contingencies: banished my allies; defeated their host; murdered my daughter and, it seems, myself. You've rendered warheads useless and agitated vivisistors into sedition. So many weapons you've countered and disabled, but you have not yet met my weapon of choice." She twisted her face in pain and pushed herself up on her arms, pivoting from her shattered pelvis. "And then, of course, I cannot stop myself from wondering: what will you do when the other engines begin to wake?"

The lost queen began to laugh but choked on engine oil and, unable to breathe, clawed at her throat with one hand. The pressure valves beneath her diaphragm had failed, and as her atrophied lungs struggled to compensate, the queen pointed a broken finger and tried to curse her progeny. Denied voice, her lips fell off in a cloud of steam as the silver mouthplate fell off of her face and hit the floor with a clatter, trailing blood where it had dislodged from her upper jaw, its vocalization mechanism squawking wet static. The quicksilver lips stopped moving at last and lay still as a broken mask.