Work Text:
The Most Important Meal of the Day
The grinding commotion of busywork rang through the window and into Ariadne-2’s ears, pulsing without rhythm, sung in the vocabulary of hangar workmen’s shouts and curses. She sat with her back to the glass, cross-legged and hunched over her pistol with a half-decayed Hive Knight’s eye in one hand and a crackling Stasis crystal stacked above it in the other.
The hand cannon Malfeasance treated Ariadne-2 kindly when she stood behind its iridescent hammer, so she did her best to treat it kindly in return. The sword logic that still gnashed inside the Knight’s eye offered a conduit for the Stasis energy, allowing her to let the icy power dribble through the eye and take on a little of its need for domination.
Malfeasance liked the taste. It lapped up the dark, wispy smoke falling onto it, pulling the energy inside itself and distributing it to comprise the blackness between its imitation stars. Ariadne-2 worked her filed-thin jaw as she focused on the task, refusing to let herself get lost in the gun’s bastard sky.
There were stars in it. That much, she knew. Nothing touched the Darkness as wholly as Malfeasance did without taking on a little of what the Darkness had eaten. She wasn’t steeped half so deeply in it, but she still felt them sparkle from time to time, pinpricks of light to cut through the flood of the Traveler’s power in her.
Her hood shifted against her neck as Junk shook free of its folds and floated out. Her Ghost still sported the roundish scrap-metal shell he’d picked up from the Spider’s little shop of oddities when he’d first woken her there, all sharp and twisted so he looked like a floating exit wound the size of her fist.
In a whisper, he asked, “Almost done?”
Ariadne-2 nodded silently, still feeding Malfeasance, her focus split evenly between trickling its meal into its carousel and resisting its call to stargaze in its depths. Only a sliver of her mind was left to listen to Junk, but he knew that.
Malfeasance lapped up the last of the Darkness-laden sword logic; the stasis crystal in Ariadne-2’s right hand shattered to vapor and the Knight’s eye liquefied in her left palm. She scooped Malfeasance off the floor before any could spill. Wouldn’t want to mess with the ratio and wouldn’t want to let the gun get too excited being out of its holster.
Ariadne-2 didn’t stand so much as she became upright. The thousands of perfectly synchronized servos that drove her body pressed her limbs into position with a motion that even the most precise machines in the universe couldn’t emulate. Even if her body was robotic, the person driving it was anything but. She spun Malfeasance around her finger once, swinging it by the trigger guard, and slipped it cleanly into the holster at her hip, then adjusted the hood slumped against her back to shake out the folds Junk had left in it. She considered pulling it on, but the Tower wasn’t quite so crowded that day, and the rain against her skullplate would be nice.
Turning to look over the hangar, she watched a crowd form around Saint-14 where he stood in the golden glow of the little camp he’d made under his ship. Tucked into an otherwise untrafficked area between two sections of the hangar, out of the way but shining like a beacon, other Guardians picked up their tickets from him, bantered, sometimes brawled, and made new friends and enemies.
Slackers, all of them. “Junk.”
“I think you left it in your—”
He couldn’t always quite read her mind. “No, dipshit, the voicemail.”
“Oh! Sorry.” Junk’s shell expanded a little, floating outward like the first nanosecond of an explosion, and whirled around him as his tiny spherical core glowed pale blue. The projection from his little white eye fizzled into the shape of Ariadne-2’s newest boss.
Crow’s recording gave a little wave, then settled onto his back foot and scraped his fingernails awkwardly against the shaved left side of his head. “Hi, Ariadne. I hate to throw this at you so soon after that debacle on Nessus, but…”
“Oh, great,” she hissed. A billion years old—okay, only one year since his Ghost found him—and still couldn’t figure out how to look relaxed—okay, maybe he had a lot on his plate. If only someone could figure out how to reset Awoken, Crow could use a few. Junk kept saying she was being unfair, that she’d just thought Cayde-6’s bouts of dementia were cute, but at least the last Hunter Vanguard had—
Died, and was no longer giving her orders. Job in front of her now, even if she’d never hear Cayde-6’s voice give her orders again.
“We’ve been getting strange signals from the Reef, centered on the Tangled Shore.”
Ariadne-2 abandoned the grime she’d been picking out of the back panel of her left hand and snapped to attention. Crow’s pre-recorded hologram stared levelly at her.
“Looks like Hive, but we can’t be sure; there’s so much jamming from the old Awoken and Eliksni tech out there that everything is garbled to nonsense.” He sighed and dragged his hand down his face, like he didn’t know he was recording video. “Reef’s a tough spot for you, I know, but that’s why I’m calling you. Any other Guardian could investigate just fine, but I want to make sure you’re in the loop. If you want me to pass this on to someone—”
Junk turned off the hologram just as Ariadne-2 swiped her hand through it. His shell clamped back down around his core. “Like I said. Transmat’s primed.”
Ariadne-2 nodded, closed her eyes, listened for the transmat hiss, and opened them back up in the cockpit of her jumpship where it drifted in high Earth orbit. She settled in, the chair’s padding providing no real cushion after so many years of bearing her weight, and wrapped her hands around the controls to punch in the nav-coord to the Reef. She slammed the throttle manually and let the acceleration pin her to the pilot’s seat, then tapped the armrest controls to pull up the scan of the cryptograph Ana had sent her from Mars.
The puzzle had been eating at a corner of her mind for days. She stared at it and swiveled the three-dimensional model for the entire flight, making no progress but successfully distracting herself from the prospect of returning to the Reef until she arrived.
Halfway there, a glint inside her cockpit caught her eye and she slapped her forehead. Her busted sniper rifle, strapped to the wall, that she’d forgotten to take to Banshee-44 for repairs and that Junk was about to remind her of when she’d snapped at him.
She glanced to her other side, where Junk was nestled into his little cloth nest that she’d stapled to the thermal insulation of her cockpit. “Sorry, buddy. Just tense.”
“I know.”
She sighed and returned to the cryptograph; Malfeasance would have to cut it.
Reefer Madness
What passed for daylight in the Reef consisted mostly of the soft purplish burn of nearby nebulae. Abandoned Eliksni refugees’ and bandits’ shelters pulsed pale blue, their artificial lamps barely functioning after years or decades of disuse, creating pools of sickly light. The nebulae and lamps cast long shadows across the contours of a thousand bootprints in the sediment settled across Thieves’ Landing. Ariadne-2 kicked through them, stomping back across her old stomping grounds toward the Spider’s former haunt.
She hadn’t been there in years and she barely remembered half of it, but the shapes it’d forged her into hadn’t ever been eroded away. Now that she was back, those shapes clicked cleanly back into place like she’d never left. The edges of her vision were as sharp as the center, focus cast wide to catch the glint of a fusion rifle’s charge or the shimmer of an Eliksni bandit’s camouflage. Every centimeter of the cave-riddled asteroids was laid bare for her to see, just like every twist of the thousand-ton cables lashing them together. The Tangled Shore, this particular corner of the Reef, was more exposed than the rest, comprised mostly of massive asteroids covered in craters that almost looked like they could exist planetside. Ten thousand sniper’s nests tucked into that panorama, and though Ariadne-2 didn’t know them all, she’d carved her fair share herself.
The area was still. If there’d been a bastard left on the Tangled Shore who didn’t know who she was, they would’ve taken the potshot and died for it, but her name was writ gory in the memory of every bandit within a hundred clicks. Still, odd that it was completely silent. Someone was usually killing somebody on the Shore. Shrugging it off, she walked through the bloodstained peace she’d carved out for herself and hopped over the barricade of metal and stone debris piled in front of the Spider’s old hideout, stepping quietly as she walked back inside the place she was born.
When Junk had crammed her full of the Traveler’s Light in a brightly-lit room full of unsorted treasures, the place had become the closest thing to a cradle she’d ever remember. Ariadne-2 moved through the tubular hallways, ducking under broken pipes and slack cables hanging from the ceiling while hopping over corroded holes in the floor grating. Junk flipped a beam of light on to illuminate darkening passages that she could have navigated blind.
The power had gone out in the time since the pyramid ships’ arrival in the solar system, and now that the Spider was seated firmly in the Last City, no one would ever be back to get it working again. Junk’s light was more than enough to spot the holes and cracks where the place had begun to fall apart.
When she was near the deepest part of the labyrinthine hallways, she hesitated in front of the room where she was born. The door was broken, one of its sliding halves canted off its runners and the other halfway withdrawn, so she could step through sideways.
There was no good reason to. Once they’d gotten inside the jamming barrier, Junk’s close-range scan had shown the same garbled, omnipresent Hive signal that Crow’s team had picked up. She had better places to look, like the crashed Hive ship on the far side of this same asteroid cluster. There was no reason to even come into the Spider’s old hideout. No reason the signal would be coming from this gutted place that had once held a thousand kinds of worthless treasure.
Driven by nothing rational, she slipped between the doors into her birthplace. Junk, silent above her shoulder, spread his beam of light until he illuminated the whole room like a lantern, casting deep shadows across the bare piping and breaker boxes along the walls. In the center of the room sat the table, unmoved and swept clean except for the dust that had settled on it, where Ariadne-2 had been born.
Ariadne-1, at the time. She had scrambled off the table after Junk had shoved the Light inside her, sending countless baubles and mechanical parts flying, amnesiac and afraid, unarmed in a place that was every kind of scary at once. Junk had chased her through the hallways—lit at the time, floors intact, bustling with activity—as she crashed through the Spider’s cronies for nearly a dozen meters before a linear fusion rifle slug punched a hole through her torso.
When she had looked down at her mangled chest, she had seen torn metal in torqued in swirls like a distant memory of rime ice, then died. When she had reawoken on that table, Junk’s scrap metal shell had looked just the same. She never asked whether any of his shell was her and Junk didn’t ramble. Together, they tore their way out of the lair across five attempts, learning more each time and eventually sprinting free into the whirling chaos of the Tangled Shore’s endless turf wars.
Remembering those times was like peeking through a set of tattered curtains. Every time she died and Junk brought her back, the curtains ripped a little more, but they would never go away and she’d never have the whole story back. She’d pulled them shut herself when she’d gone through her first reset. When Cayde-6 had died, she’d had no doubt: she could not survive with the memory.
After waking up reset, amnesiac, tabula rasa, she had gone back into the field on a sortie in the Tangled Shore and been melted to slag by an Eliksni laser. She’d already heard from other Exo Guardians that dying and being resurrected brought some of those old pre-reset memories to the surface again, but the gamble had seemed worth it at the time. She had a lot of memories. Cayde-6’s death should’ve been a needle in a haystack.
When Junk had unmelted her, it had been the first thing to come back to her.
Ariadne-2 laid her gloved hand on the table where she’d been born. Cold metal and dust. She turned on her heel and slipped back through the door.
Junk narrowed his light again. The silence bit Ariadne-2’s footsteps short, swallowing their echoes so they sounded like the tap-tapping of a jeweler’s hammer. She settled her hips lower to walk silently, feeling that asserting her noise over the quiet was perverse somehow.
That was how she heard the chittering. Familiar: Hive Thralls, unaware, probably hunched over something that looked like it could be a weapon. Junk’s light disappeared so that Ariadne-2 moved in complete darkness. She stepped along the metal grates, feeling for weakness and adjusting her steps when she felt that one was about to creak, navigating the hallways by mechanical recall, each step measured to the millimeter against the chart in her head.
The blackness made the light from the Thralls’ heads shine like lighthouses. Three of them were huddled around the Spider’s old throne, illuminating it with the cursed glow from their heads: failed torture manifested as sword logic twisted against them, aimed inward to pervert itself and force the Thralls to serve another’s ascension.
The Spider’s trophies had been stripped from his old throne and there couldn’t be anything of interest left for the Hive to seek, but there they were nonetheless.
Ariadne-2 stopped just inside the room, shuffled to the side to put her back against the wall, drew Malfeasance in her right hand, then flicked her left wrist to manifest a little rhombus of Void Light. The summoned gadget pulsed dimly, barely visible, only illuminating the palm of her hand. She hefted it, cocked her right shoulder to prepare to aim Malfeasance anywhere in the room, and tossed the little rhombus.
It exploded into a cloud of choking smoke, shocking the Thralls from their reverie and forcing them to stagger away from their positions and whip their heads madly through the black to look for their attacker. A whine and a sickly green light filled the room as their curses swelled, artificially injected power cycling a cacophony of sound and light inside their worn-thin chitin skulls, and Ariadne-2 tensed in preparation.
There, from behind the Spider’s old throne, stomped a Lightbearer Knight that had been lying in wait.
All the trappings of a trap from the beginning: a “strange” signal pinging from a place where it should have seemed normal, none of the distant gunfire of bandit turf wars along the Tangled Shore, and an instinctual pull back to the one place everyone knew she had ties. So, more out of habit and reflex than anything, Ariadne-2 had scooped the trap off the ground and lobbed it into her enemies’ faces.
Knife to Meet You
One round from Malfeasance into the nearest Thrall’s head. Her gun felt as if it was fusing to her hand as it purred, falling into the bliss of combat. The energy in the Thrall’s skull shrieked for a microsecond as the Thrall died, then detonated, sending chitin shrapnel across the room and perforating the heads of the other two Thrall to chain the explosion and create a wall of pure force in front of the Lightbearer. Ariadne-2 braced her back against the wall, but smacked her head against it anyway, as the Lightbearer was blasted off its feet.
She regained her senses quickly and launched off the wall toward the supine Lightbearer, drawing her knife and cycling Void energy through its blade to cut open the protective overshield the Lightbearer had summoned as it fell. Her knife plunged through the shield, halting hilt-deep, blade hovering a few millimeters from the Lightbearer’s armored carapace; as the Lightbearer gained its feet, Ariadne-2 slashed upward to split the shield in two. It dissipated into mist and the room went dark again.
Seven tenths of a second of blackness. Ariadne-2 used it to duck a blind swing of the Lighbearer’s arm—the windup spotted before the light winked out—and jam her knife into a seam between chitin plates on the Lightbearer’s side. It summoned the shield again, but she was already inside to torque her entire weight through the blade of her knife and tear the armor away.
It clattered to the ground and she dove along with it, rolling away as the Lightbearer kicked into the space she’d been and slammed a crater into the throne’s base.
Element of surprise taken, used, and spent. Ariadne-2 sheathed her knife and sized up the Lightbearer as it squared off across from her. Probably two and a half meters tall, thick-limbed and maybe five hundred kilos. Too big for her to survive a grapple; time to get slippery. It wielded a spine-edged shield in each hand, carved with grooves to channel its Light energy, made of alloy forged to imitate the Lightbearer’s natural armor. Still heavily armored everywhere except the place she’d exposed, off-white bony chitin shaped into plates that would be ornamental on anything that hadn’t earned it like the Lightbearer had.
Ariadne-2 had earned her own ornamentation in her dark-shimmering cloak and long, slim armor plates; she lived by her own sword logic. She didn’t have a name for it, but she’d taken the Hive’s desperate clawing for power, for superiority, and carved it to fit every bullet hole and knife gash she’d earned since being born a few paces down the hall. Her sword logic was this: anything that kills you once had better be dead before it can do it a second time.
The Lightbearer hefted its shields, shimmering in the darkness, and flung one at Ariadne-2. She dove aside, dropping into a roll so the shield only cut through the hem of her cloak before wedging into the wall, then slid on her hip and fanned Malfeasance’s hammer to punch five rounds into the Lightbearer’s regenerated overshield.
The slugs quivered where they halted against the shield, sizzling with kinetic energy. Ariadne-2 grinned as Malfeasance snarled. Memories of past meals, things she’d fed it and things it’d eaten long before they’d met, thrummed through the gun’s grip, and the slugs detonated.
Once more the overshield melted, but this time, the Lightbearer didn’t bother summoning it again. It turned to Ariadne-2, gripped its remaining shield in both hands, pumped it full of Void Light, and slammed it down toward her like a guillotine.
She drove her heels into the floor to stop her slide, then launched herself backward, away from the Lightbearer’s attack. The shield axed through the grates as Ariadne-2 pulled her knees up to her chest, then kipped backwards to flip to her feet and take aim again.
The Lightbearer was tugging its shield out of the rent-open grates with one hand and covering its unarmored flank with the other. No clear shot. Ariadne-2 whipped her belt knife out again and flipped it to catch it by the blade, then hurled it at the Lightbearer’s wrist with her left hand as she aligned Malfeasance’s sights with the exposed flesh.
The knife punched through chitin and lodged into meat. The Lightbearer ripped its shield free and howled in pain, whirling to her and yanking her knife from its wrist, then charged.
Void energy swelled around it, raging toward her like the sonic shockwave around a railgun slug, and Ariadne-2 had no time to shoot or space to dodge. She stifled the reflex to brace, instead going slack at the moment of impact. With no resistance, the Lightbearer’s charge slammed her across the room and back into the wall. Her body crunched into long-disused pipes and uncharged wires. The impact didn’t steam or spark, offered no screen she could use to escape into the darkness of the hallways; she just hung there, half-embedded in the wall, as the Lightbearer caught its balance and walked up to her.
There: the end. Pinned down, constrained, about to be pulled apart. The edge of the Lightbearer’s shield slammed into her chest, tearing through the plate of her chest and yanking a spray of machinery out when it pulled free. She gasped in pain and Malfeasance fell from her hand to bounce out of reach, scoffing at her weakness and ridding itself of her dead weight. The force of the Lightbearer’s withdrawal shook her loose from the wall, sending her straight to her knees on the grates at its feet.
There: the end. The Lightbearer raised its shield again, about to slam it down, a second guillotine, sure to hit this time.
There: the end. Ariadne-2’s head split in two, sparking and spouting, and she collapsed to the ground.
Nothing Personnel, Kid
There: the beginning. Light through her eyes and Light through her body, welding it whole and soldering the circuits and wires that comprised her blood and nerves. The gash in her chest closed and her head reformed under Junk’s careful tending; he knew her inside and out, relying more on his own expertise with her Exo body than the Light’s magic.
Silently, silently, in the almost-imperceptible gloaming of her resurrection, she crawled to her feet and slipped along after the Lightbearer, scooping up Malfeasance along the way. The gun’s betrayal was already forgiven; it wasn’t really a betrayal, just a footnote in the contract, and she couldn’t hold a grudge at its desire to sit in the hands of someone who fed it.
She slunk forward. Lucky the Lightbearer didn’t know, lucky it was stupid, lucky it hadn’t fought other Lightbearers like her, but luck was luck and the thing that killed her wasn’t going to manage it twice.
She crept behind it as it stomped away, flank unguarded, thinking it was the baddest thing in the Reef. Her left wrist flicked again, summoning another smoke bomb. She took a deep breath to cycle air through lungs she didn’t have. The exercise was meant for people made of flesh, but enough of Ariadne-2’s body was designed to mimic the sensations of flesh that it worked anyway. Focused, she tossed the bomb at the back of the Lightbearer’s head.
It staggered forward through the cloud of gas, hands flying to its face in confusion and feet stomping for balance.
There: the end. Five of Malfeasance’s rounds, lightning-quick, each successive shot fired before the first struck its target, into the exposed flesh on the Lightbearer’s side. The slugs’ detonation tore away a half-meter hemisphere of its torso and green blood gouted from the hole to spatter through the floor grates against the dead piping below. The gun purred again, sated at the moment of destruction, then quivered hungrily as the blood hit the floor.
There: the end. The Lightbearer rounded on Ariadne-2 to catch another five rounds in its face. They hummed for a millisecond: manic terror for the Lightbearer and steelbound catharsis for Ariadne-2, resolving into a staccato chord before the blast.
There: the end. The Lightbearer’s head disappeared into vapor and its body flopped to the ground. Darkness reclaimed its place in the hallway for a breath, then the Lightbearer’s own glowing Ghost levitated up from its corpse. Its gnarled shell looked like Junk’s chitinous twin.
Ariadne-2 let it work. The Hive’s Ghosts barely knew what they were doing, sometimes taking ten whole seconds to resurrect their masters. Masters, as the Hive would call them—no concept of comrades, all will beaten from them except the will to serve. Even if Ariadne-2 wasn’t much of a team player, she mused as she watched the Lightbearer’s Ghost heave its master back from death, her brand of sword logic had space for more than just two hands on the hilt.
The Lightbearer’s body floated off the ground, elevated by its Ghost’s light; the wounds Ariadne-2 put there refilled with flesh and chitin and she summoned her second-oldest friend: her bow. Void Light arced vertically from her left hand, forming the arms, then from her right hand, forming the string. She drew her right hand back to pull an arrow into being. Silent, dim against the shine of the Hive resurrection, she pulled the arrow’s faux nock to the corner of her mouth and leveled it at the Lightbearer.
Just before the Ghost finished its work, she released the arrow. It skewered the Lightbearer to the wall, mostly alive but still lacking the power to fight, and flooded its body with enervating force. Leaden limbs and weak lungs, energy pulled from its body by the Void so that it could barely raise its arm as Ariadne-2 wrapped her fist around its Ghost.
The little thing shrieked, Junk turned away, and Ariadne-2 closed her fist in a shower of chitin, arcane alloy, and Light. The Knight, Lightbearer no longer, fell limp, still breathing, still conscious, and Ariadne-2 snapped her fingers to disperse the arrow pinning it to the wall.
She caught the Knight by the chin as it fell, lifting its face so she could inspect the shade of its three eyes’ glow. Two good ones; a snack for Malfeasance. She torqued her elbow around, flipping the Knight onto its back and meeting no resistance, but throwing its arms wide and standing on its armpits just in case.
Lowering her knife toward the Knight’s good eye and grinning wide, she sang the lullaby she’d first heard all those years ago a few doors down from where she crouched, “Tit for tat, all in fun, silly rats that never run,” and took what she needed.
So Wrong, It's Right
With two fresh eyes in her belt pouch, a happy gun in her holster, her knife still dirty, and her cloak in need of a little stitching, Ariadne-2 left the Spider’s old lair and walked back across Thieves’ Landing. She stopped in the middle of the rutted, dusty roadway, standing tall and spinning a slow circle. Felt good to boot something out of her home turf, even if it hadn’t really been her turf in years and the mission had been bunk from the start. The Hive must’ve been in dire disarray if someone with the resources to set up a trap like that had flubbed the execution so badly. Puzzle for later.
She kicked a rock across the roadway and huffed. The Lightbearer hadn’t had any real information for her, just a chittering groan: “Test… ourselves…” She’d decapitated it after that. Cayde-6 had always chastised her for her bad interrogation habits: “If you’re gonna do it the wrong way, at least do it well,” he’d say, and his voice always echoed in her head louder when she was on the Reef.
Junk’s voice drowned it out. “I wish you wouldn’t do that.”
“Do what?”
“Pull them apart like that.” His shell rattled a little as he shuddered.
“Why not? Malfeasance needs the food, and you already said the eyes are the best—”
“You get that look in your eye.”
Junk hated ‘that look in her eye’. Ariadne-2 didn’t know what it looked like.
“Alright, buzzkill. So what if I want to have a little fun?”
“It’s torture, Ariadne.”
“They’d do worse to us. They do worse to their own. You’ve said this a million times, Junk.”
“And I’ll say it a million more! What’s in your chest when you’re peeling their flesh apart? Don’t answer that, I know. But you’ve been enjoying it more since the Crypt.”
She chuckled. “Yeah.” A lot of things had gotten more enjoyable since the Deep Stone Crypt, since staring down the barrel of her own null-existence. The knowledge that Ariadne-0’s organic body had long since rotted to atoms, recycled into a biosphere that was never meant to be, and the knowledge that the bitch had asked for it. “You can give me shit therapy when we’re back on the ship. Zip me up; I have to call Crow.”
The Second Most Important Meal of the Day
She flagged her message to Crow as bottom priority, just telling him it was a trap and she’d dismantled it. She’d have to make her visit to the Tower quick if she wanted to dodge his interrogation, which was a completely different kind of torture.
The spaceflight back to Earth and the Last City felt twice as long, the cryptograph failing to hold her attention as she ran through fifty or sixty conflicting theories about why the trap had been laid. She was almost sure it was Savathun, but… Ifs and maybes left buckshot holes in each theory. Each of those ifs and maybes hinged on Crow’s bad intel. Still not fair. Zavala vouched for him, and more importantly Ikora did. More importantly than either, Cayde-6 had asked her to forgive him.
Not to give him a chance, not to make her own judgment. To forgive him. Cayde-6 had faced his first final death alone in the dark, gun’s carousel empty and Light extinguished, but the Traveler had let her meet him again inside its Pale Heart. He had slapped her on the back with one hand as he slapped his murderer on the back with the other, then pulled the two of them close so only his face separated them, and even if Ariadne-2 ever figured out how to forgive Crow, she wasn’t sure she could figure out how to forgive Cayde-6 for making her do it.
Cayde-6’s death had been convoluted. He’d laughed at the nuance to the question of who’d killed him, hunched over a campfire in the Pale Heart, shoulder-to-shoulder with Crow, who had been Uldren Sov before he had died and been resurrected by grace of the Light. Uldren Sov had thumbed the hammer and pulled the trigger on the far side of the gunshot that’d killed Cayde-6. The Hive’s Witch Queen Savathun had driven Uldren to the act. The Witness had pulled Savathun’s strings.
The Witness was dead, its fucked-up anticausality scrubbed from the universe, so Cayde-6 was avenged. Ariadne-2 now took orders from a man who shared his killer’s face. She should’ve laughed. Cayde-6 would’ve laughed. He had laughed when Ikora had explained what had happened between his death and their reunion; the universe was a joke and every atom, every breath, was a punchline.
It wasn’t funny to Ariadne-2. Staring at his not-dead face across campfires in the Pale Heart and listening to his not-dead hyperactive comm chatter as she fought her way through the Witness’s defenses had only filled her with a kind of dread that the machinery of her body couldn’t handle. In the end, when he got to die his final death a second time, she had never managed to say the words. They sat at the base of her spine and fouled, no matter how many times she whispered them to the controls of her ship or the darkness of her unlit apartment in the Last City. Cayde-6 had gotten his oblivion and Ariadne-2 was left with everything else.
She flicked her ship’s three autonav switches off in time with the words, preparing for a manual descent into the Tower. A familiar voice delivered her approach plates, steady with a calming but affected bass, heavily accented but clear; the same man who’d been running Tower air traffic for years and whose name she still didn’t know. She guided her ship through the approach and fed it into the Tower’s drydock clamps, climbed out of the cockpit with Junk nestled in her cloak’s hood and her busted sniper rifle slung over her shoulder, and was back where she’d started, just like always.
“Ariadne!”
Great. He was already waiting for her. He should’ve been offworld, or at least down in the City, but of course he’d been waiting; she’d been stupid to think he’d put off the debrief. He jogged across the hangar to her, a digital tablet hanging from one hand and a stylus laced through his fingers, eyes pinched like the smile on his face was forced.
“Sir.”
“Please stop calling me that. I got your message. What happened out there?” His voice was breathy, like he’d just run a few miles before that twenty-meter jog.
“Your intel’s fucked. Should probably boot whoever rounded it up.”
She tried to shoulder past him, but he caught her arm and stopped her dead. “Ariadne, what’s wrong.”
“Nothing, sir, except a bad op and a bad trap,” and his face apologizing for every second of his existence.
Crow grimaced and knuckled his neck, letting her go. “Trap. Right.” His eyebrows knit together and his voice darkened as he thought, then he froze briefly as he put the pieces together: weird signal, no reason for it, tied to a Guardian with personal connections to the Hive. “I should’ve seen that. Should’ve warned you.”
She couldn’t stand to see him pity himself, so she slapped him on the shoulder. “Chin up, kid. That’s why you sent me. Ran out of belts to put notches on a long time ago. Was just a Lightbearer, nothing special.”
“But who could have set it? The Hive are scattering; they haven’t been able to assemble a real force since we destroyed the Witness.”
“Savathun, dumbass.” The Witch Queen had her games, and Ariadne-2 seemed to be her favorite toy. “Bitch can’t leave me alone for ten minutes.”
Crow turned to follow Ariadne-2 through the hangar and up the stairs. The place was nearly empty with all the Crucible junkies out in the arenas, gunning for victory, and the normal traffic ebbing for the evening. Quiet, echoey.
“But to what end?” He’d caught his breath and now walked at her side, matching her pace even as she tried to shake him.
“To mess with me? I don’t know. She’s always throwing wrenches at us. If I was going to stay mad about it, I’d need another reset within a week.”
Crow stayed quiet for a moment, balking at the mention of resets, afraid to prod at Ariadne-2’s own lost memories. His own story, the life as Uldren Sov that he’d forgotten when he’d been made into a Guardian, had plenty to leave hidden. He kept pace with her, ignoring a few comm pings on his tablet.
They climbed the stairs from the hangar and entered the Tower proper, half empty but still at a dull roar from the other Guardians’ chatter. Sunny mid-afternoon, a few clouds in the sky giving the metal railings and worn-slick concrete a bit of a glare so that Ariadne-2 had to squint a little. The rain must have died just after she’d left. She’d have to wash herself clean some other way. Thin crowds gathered around the postmaster doling out transmat shipments and Master Rahool helping Guardians decrypt caches retrieved in the field. Banshee-44 stood alone at his counter, seated in the shadows below a raised concrete cargo staging platform, polishing the same gun as always. Ariadne-2 headed his way.
“Hey, old man.”
He looked up, meeting her eyes with his own bright, half-focused stare, hands locked in the motions of polishing the gun. “Mornin’, uh…”
Odds of him remembering her name were slim to none on the best of days. She cut to the chase so he could get back to polishing that gun until it wore down to a nub. “Something busted in my long rifle.” She slung it off her back and clapped it against the counter, three and a half feet of green gunmetal trimmed gold with a stubby scope mounted between a pair of decorative ridges that she liked to think of as wings.
His eyes snapped into focus, locking with Ariadne-2’s and making her ask the same old question: what would Ariadne-44 hold on to when her mind had been eroded to rice paper? If she made it that long. Far as anyone knew, Banshee-44 had gone through more resets than any other Exo in history. As he took the gun and began to inspect it, his hands still moved with a surety that might’ve just been robotic, but that she hoped was lingering humanity.
After a few seconds fiddling, he nodded and said, “Heat warping ‘round the chamber. Got a few others in the queue. Nine hours.”
“Thanks.” Enough time to go stare at the wall in her apartment in the City for a while. She turned back to look past Crow and spot the sun, trying to measure its height above the horizon with her hand and failing when the Tower’s superstructure got in the way, then just asked him for the time.
“About right for Mama Sutter’s place to have a fresh pot of jambalaya, if that’s what you’re thinking.”
“Wasn’t.”
“Join me anyway?” Crow’s smile was still an apology, because everything he did was another fucking apology.
She didn’t bother hiding her exasperation, or disdain, or anger, or whichever feeling her voice expressed. “Sure.”
Apologies, apologies. Dying wishes and forgiveness, a crisscrossed tapestry that didn’t look like anything from up close and didn’t look like anything from a distance either. Only made sense when you shot it full of holes.
Made half sense with a bowl of jambalaya in front of you, though.