“Blood, bones, and bile,” Senrii gasped as the elevator came to a halt at the bottom of the shaft. She stepped off the platform into a vast chamber filled with color.

Living in Thorssel, she’d seen plenty of coral structures in her life. But she’d never seen structures built with this much intricacy: urchin-like networks of transparent spines bearing neural pathways, tall calculation arrays that glowed with an inner light, tank after tank of tiny jellyfish blinking on and off in an inscrutable pattern, releasing dazzling displays of light. No dedicated lumins hung on the walls or from the cavernous ceiling here; every ray had its source in some bioluminescing node or another, and the effect was an ever-changing rainbow of dazzling hues painting every nook and cranny of the chamber. “This is the Thorssel Archon Tool?”

“Merely the control room,” her father said as he followed her into the chamber.

“You were pretty smart not to bring me down here when I was younger, Dad. Even now, I have a pretty strong urge to slap every button and turn every knob just to see what they’ll do.”

“In all likelihood, you’d flood the chamber, sink the city, and transform the Tool into an enormous ravening chimera. I advise against this course of action.”

Senrii turned around and stared at her father. “Was that a joke? Did you actually make a joke?”

“No. Why would I have?”

His demeanor was so serious that it had to be humor. “Har har.” Senrii turned back to the maze of lights and colors. “So what are we doing down here?”

“I thought it prudent to give the newest Comes of Gens Nethress the opportunity to delve more deeply into our family’s holdings.”

The newest Comes. That was a nice thought. “Hold your horses, Daddy. I’m not in the Comitatus yet.”

“No, but you succeeded in your Prime Assay. There will be no cause to hold you back.” Except, Senrii thought, for the obvious one: she was Dorsin’s daughter. “It is as good as done.”

“I failed at the secondary objective.”

“Then it is well capturing a Nxtlu Key was your secondary objective, rather than your primary.” They were silent for a few moments as Senrii digested this shard of wisdom. He was certainly right about that. It was one thing to exfil some tiny vials. It was another thing altogether to capture an experienced, high-ranking Magus of Gens Nxtlu and somehow keep him subdued all the way back to Thorssel.

“In fact,” Dorsin continued, “for the past three weeks, I have been considering contingencies in the event that you would not succeed in acquiring a Key. None of the Gens truly expected it of you, I think. If they did, I fear I may have spoken too highly of your abilities to them.”

“Two jokes in one day, Daddy? Might consider taking a breather. That has to be exhausting.”

Hard, wide hands fell on her shoulders. She got her height from her father, but he still towered over her; whatever other complaints Dorsin might have about his luck of the draw in the genetic lottery, he couldn’t bemoan his height or strength. Maybe that was why he had been such a great warrior? What he lacked in the Bond, he made up for in sheer muscle?

And in the strength of his mind, of course. He’d definitely passed that one on to Senrii, if she did say so herself.

His voice was lower, calmer, soothing. “So, daughter mine, soon to be the newest Comes of our great Gens, take a moment and enjoy the view.”

“Gladly.”

Silence fell again, and when Dorsin spoke, a hint of amusement touched his voice. “I thought I would never see wonder quite as powerful as that on your young man-friend’s face during our ride in the carriage, but it seems I was mistaken.”

“Seriously, Daddy? What’s gotten into you?”

“Am I disturbing you?”

“No. It’s nice to see — hear, whatever — you smile. It’s just. You know. Weird.”

“My daughter has returned to me. That is reason enough to smile. But speaking of your friend…”

“Tvorh.”

“Speaking of Tvorh, we have matters to discuss. Tell me his story.”

“Too afraid to ask him during the ride, now you’ve gotta pump your daughter for information? Kidding, kidding. Blood, Dad, it was a joke.”

“Tell me.”

Senrii flicked her hands this way and that as she tossed off detail after detail. “Not much to tell, about his life, anyway. Grew up common born to a janitor in Acerbia, who used to take him to the Archives during his rounds there. Father died, mom and he went below ground, mom gave birth to twins — Tvorh thinks it was parthenogenic —”

“Interesting.”

“—Mom disappears, kid scrounges meals for his sisters for years. No, the history isn’t that interesting. Listen to this. The day of my Assay, one of the girls, Hrega, ran deeper into the Labyrinth than Tvorh had ever been before, saying their mom was calling to her. She found her way to a big crystal door, right? Tvorh opens it.”

Dorsin held his doubt close to his spirit, not letting it show. “Go on.”

“It’s a Last Era Libraratory.”

“The child opened a Last Era installation?”

“Hold on, it gets better. I know what you’re thinking, but you can’t just skip to the end of the story. Anyway, they explore for a while, kill a Chimera —”

Now Dorsin did raise his eyebrows. “Impressive.”

“I dunno. It could have been a teeny tiny Chimera for all I know, I wasn’t there. But here’s the thing. They come back up, we meet — how’s not important right now — talk to me, yadda yadda. I convince them to take me back down. But me?” Senrii winked at her father. “I can’t open the door!”

“Because it’s Keyed.”

“Right. To the kid’s genes! He lets us in, no problem. And I exfil a little bit more data than I had originally intended.” Senrii grinned as her skinsuit gave way for her fingers and she withdrew several dozen vials from an internal pocket. “Call it my tertiary objective,” she said proudly.

“That data will almost certainly be encrypted.”

“Pretty sure Tvorh decrypted it when he got the machine to open up and spill these pretties. Yeah, that’s right. I couldn’t get the Libraratory machinery to work, but he could.”

“Senrii,” Dorsin said quietly, “do you have any idea what you’ve found?”

“Yeah, I know, the answer to our prayers. Story’s still not done.”

“A missing genetic legacy from the Last Era. A whole Libraratory right under Acerbia. Right under our lands. And right under the Nxtlu squatters.”

“We’ll take ‘em down, Daddy.”

“Mmm. Please, continue with your story.”

“So the kid wanders off for a while as I poke around. I, uh… I realize we have to get out of there.”

Dorsin caught the change in her tone at once. “They followed you,” he said sharply.

Well, there went her promotion. “Yeah,” Senrii said weakly. “They did.”

“So they know.”

“Listen, Dad—”

“We must move to secure the Libraratory at once.”

“Dad—”

Dorsin began to pace. Bioluminescence of every color crawled across his face, his suit, as he walked. “It’s almost certain that the information you exfiltrated from the Libraratory will have been written in High Exarchian jargon incomprehensible to most of us. Calling on Gens Takahashi to translate the data may take too long, but our Archives in Acerbia were the primary data storage and processing unit for Last Era anthropological matters, including—”

“Dad, Tvorh’s mom is still in there.”

Dorsin ceased his pacing at once. “Excuse me?”

“Tvorh said she was in one of the rooms there. The little girl was right. She somehow knew where her mother was.”

“Impossible. Coincidence.” But Senrii noted the stroke of doubt that crept into his voice as he said it, if only because uncertainty was so foreign to his demeanor.

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“Doesn’t matter. I’m betting thalers to carats that whatever genes Tvorh’s carrying, his mom’s carrying too. Because she’s part of a Tool there. Tvorh told me. She’s like an auxiliary processing unit or something — has to be, because she’s not thousands of years old and she only disappeared two years ago. So not the main Tool. But the chordal units in the Libraratory? It was her voice making the announcements whenever something happened.”

“Perhaps the child was mistaken.”

“What kind of kid wouldn’t recognize his own mother?” The words escaped Senrii’s lips before she could think about them, and she realized immediately she had made a mistake. “I’m sorry,” she mumbled, as if they could deflect the blast of coldness that was sure to come from her father in response.

But Dorsin merely waved the comment aside. “It is past,” he said. “And you are right, of course.” A bright speck of pride burst into being in Senrii’s heart. Had her father actually deferred to her? “That is… remarkable.”

Senrii leaned against a tower of coral, savoring the hard-won respect of her father. She tried to dampen the gloating tone to a minimum. “I was pretty sure you’d tell me to stop making stuff up.”

“No. I…”

“No, Dad. I mean, anybody sane would tell me that I’m just making stuff up about unblooded people randomly sharing Synapsis. I mean, a girl and her mom? But you gave that line of argument up pretty quickly.” She trailed off at the end, letting the implication unvoiced hang in the air, and waited for a response.

Dorsin’s hand went to his chin, and he began pacing again. It seemed that Senrii would have to get an answer another time. “So. The boy’s mother is partially incorporated into a Last Era Tool beneath Acerbia. Nxtlu knows where it is.”

“We closed it off,” Senrii put in. “They won’t be able to open it without a Key. Bet there’s lots of nasty surprises built in if somebody tries to force the door or drill in from outside. And I bet they know that.”

“Then we protect the boy and his sisters at all costs,” Dorsin said. “Now, without a linguist capable of interpreting the data from the Libraratory, they will likely be useless, but we may as well take a look.”

Senrii handed over the vials, and Dorsin placed them snugly into a series of outlets near one of the jellyfish tanks. “Tool,” he announced into an aural unit, placing his hand over a fleshy imprint on the side of the coral, “decode and interpret.”

“At once, Magus Dux,” a sonorous, androgynous voice responded. Immediately the minuscule jellyfish began to rearrange themselves in rows and columns, forming the letters represented by the unlocked encoding of the nucleic acids within the vials.

“Tell me, my aspiring gengineer,” Dorsin said, “what do you make of this?”

Senrii grimaced. “Gibberish. I’m making out ‘sophios’ — or ‘wisdom’ or whatever — ‘quiescence’, all the stuff you’d expect from the linguistic correspondence. This string over here is probably, I dunno, some genetic encoding, or a calculation, or maybe a chemical composition. It doesn’t read like a spoken sentence.”

Dorsin nodded. “As I suspected.”

“So we’re in the Wildlands without a whaleship.”

“Well, I can call on Gens Takahashi. They may — may — be convinced to assist us if I promise the greater share of our findings to them in return for a translation.”

Senrii held up a hand as a thought flickered through her mind. “Dad. Wait. What did you say earlier, about the Archives?”

“You know that Acerbia was our Last Era research city.”

“Right, right. Close enough to the Wildlands for easy Chimera acquisition, four Last Era ruins within thirty miles. Five, now, I guess.”

“Naturally, it was in Acerbia’s Tools that we kept the greater part of our research. We lost a great deal when the Archives fell, but I suppose I could send the data to analytic Tools in other cities. They may be able to provide a fragmentary —”

“Dad,” Senrii said, “Tvorh swears he knows how to get into the Archives.”

Her father gave her a long, considering look, and Senrii wondered fleetingly if she would have to go another round to convince him. To her surprise, however, he nodded slowly. “To lose the boy is to lose our family. To do nothing is to lose our family.”

“What do you mean, Daddy?”

“To do nothing is to lose our family,” he repeated. “To use the boy is to gain the chance at life. Very well. If we can use him, we will.”

“What are you talking about, lose our family?” Senrii had never heard her father talk this way.

He shook his head. “Complicated matters. They are ultimately my fault, and I suppose it is better to tell you now rather than let you hear from the rest of the Gens. Our financial straits are dire.”

“I know, Daddy, but—”

“They are more dire than I have let on to you in the past, Senrii. We are unlikely to be able to purchase Chrysalises for both of your brothers. But while that is important, it’s nothing more than the result of my youthful indiscretions.”

“You were indiscreet once, Daddy? I find that hard to believe.”

The joke fell on flat ears. Dorsin looked grave. “The ramifications have reverberated throughout the family. One mistake has laid low an entire bloodline, and that mistake was mine. I was much younger, a brash warrior aspiring to generalship. I was also very much in love.”

“With Mom.”

“No.”

Senrii felt a kick in her gut as the pieces rapidly began to fall together. Her father’s words became only distant noise informing her of the details of the story that she was already synthesizing. “There was a… woman. More beautiful, more radiant than… I cannot say than any woman you’ve ever known, for the sweet warmth of your mother matches her. But to a young, foolish boy, her devotion was intoxicating. I had not meant to fall into that trap, but I did. She was Nxtlu property, and I took her as spoils when we retook New Pullmas.”

Dorsin paused. “Not that I treated her as property— I freed her. But she had a compelling way about her, and when I would not choose her, she chose me instead of her own free will. In any case, in time, I became a Dux, and marriage became inevitable. I could not keep her as a concubine.”

“You mean…” Senrii shook her head as much to clear the heat growing in her face as to express her discomfort. “You mean you were forced into marrying mom? That all this time —”

“Blood, child,” Dorsin said, and the oath shocked Senrii into silence. “I loved, and love, your mother as I love my own body.”

“How is that possible, if—”

“A farmer cannot tend two fields, no matter how great the yield. But that doesn’t mean a farmer cannot yearn for two fields.”

Dad, a bigamous lecher? An acidic wave of disgust washed over Senrii. “Nice Lacunar reading of that one, Father. I’m sure the Princeps would be fascinated by your interpretation of the General Principles.”

“Do not mock me in this, child,” Dorsin said, quietly enough to freeze the heat out of Senrii’s blood. “I made my choice. I would make it again a thousand times. Your mother is the heart of my life, and where she dies, I will die, and there will my bones be buried.”

“I’m sorry. Um… please. I’m sorry.”

Dorsin’s face softened. “I do not expect you to understand, Senrii. Only to accept it. Can you do that?”

Senrii shrugged. “Fine. But… what does Rosabella have to do with our finances?”

Momentary surprise crossed Dorsin’s face when Senrii named the Ambassatrix, but then he was under control once more. “My last act as Dux before marrying your mother was to purchase the Chrysalis for Rosabella. It was a disaster. Her genes are not at all fit for the Symbiont. It took more than a dozen treatments, and it almost bankrupted me. That is the reason your mother has never been Bound.”

“You… you spent all of your money on a floo—” Seeing Dorsin’s eyes flash, Senrii swallowed her words and tried again. “I’m sorry. She just… did something to me. Something weird. I didn’t like it. I felt… I felt like…”

Dorsin nodded; Senrii could tell from the unnatural calm of his voice that he was fighting to keep himself under control. “Rosabella is of a unique genetic line. I have never seen its like.”

“Where was she from? Because that thing she did —”

“She has told me, in approximate terms, of the location of her home, but I have never taken her back, nor have I tried to find it. Scota is an island, far off the eastern coast, in the Stormways. We are still unsure how she was enslaved and brought back from it; perhaps the secret is in a Nxtlu archive somewhere. In any case, you were speaking about what she did to you.”

Dorsin began to pace again. “Having… known her intimately, I feel justified in claiming that her bloodline is an ancient pedigree originally built for pleasure. Witness the toe-walk and the existence of heeled shoes as a throwback to certain Last Era standards of beauty. The forked tongue, which you may not have noticed. She swears she has two mothers, which implies some form of unique reproduction, and also that her community was ninety percent female, which would bear out either woman-to-woman pairing or extreme polygyny. Or both.”

“Do you trust her?”

Senrii had only meant regarding the story of her past, but her father’s response was so rapid and encompassing that it caught her off guard. “With my life. And then, of course, there are the pheromones, which her SOPHIOS merely enhances. I’m sure this is the unpleasant effect that you are referring to.”

“If she could reproduce with a man or a woman—”

“Yes, the pheromones’ effect on you would make sense. There are other traits that bear out my conclusion, as well, but I make my point clear. A remote and isolated ancient pedigree, designed long enough ago that the genophage had no effect on it, whose female-female attraction may have served a reproductive purpose and whose pheromones were designed to exploit this fact. Allow me to promise you that it is not intentional on her part. Ignore her effect on you for long enough, and it will go away.”

“Yeah, she said that, too. Did it go away for you?”

Dorsin sighed. “No. Never.”

Senrii shrugged. “Anyway, Father. You were saying, about money.”

“Yes. My great shame.” Dorsin sighed. “Because I had no money, because I spent it all on Rosabella’s treatments, I could not provide new Magi during the Seeding Wars. Because I could not provide new Magi, I instead provided Warlocks.”

Senrii couldn’t believe her ears. “You sent SOPHIIS in the place of SOPHIOS?” Inadequate Symbiosis was a refuge of desperation. People who’d been given the dregs of symbiotic treatments ended up with Symbionts, sure, but those Symbionts were practically separate beings, uncontrollable, driven by instinct and fear. They were almost as dangerous to the wielders as to their targets.

“It was a disaster. A single error led to catastrophe. One of them lost control in the New Pullmas Armory, where we stored our flameseed bombs. He had been given conflagratory STIGMOI.”

“I know. The Seeding Wars — Father, that Warlock was yours? The New Pullmas Inferno is legendary.”

“Fire led to fear, fear led to the other Warlocks losing control, and that set off the chain reaction that resulted in the loss of all of our armaments in the city, plus the nearby Treasury, ten years of common income, and three breeding lines. All my fault. I had no resources left— none but Rosabella’s Bond, as weak as it was. I had no choice but to sell her pedigree to the only group that would have her, in an attempt to salvage some little of my waste. If the Sodality had not taken her…”

Senrii shook her head again, and again, and again, but no matter how she tried, she could not make sense of it all. “So, Father, not only did you spend all of your money on your piece of ass on the side — no, don’t you dare try to silence me — and keep mom from getting a SOPHIOS, you also were singlehandedly responsible for us losing the Seeding Wars?”

Dorsin’s rage was evident in the sheer stillness of his face and the curve of his eyebrows. “I have not forgotten it for a single day.”

Senrii knew she ought to leave it there. She even almost managed to. Almost. “What were you thinking?”

In a single instant, Dorsin detonated. “I wasn’t! I wasn’t thinking! I forgot who I was! I forgot who was relying on me! And I have been paying for it every day in the worried eyes of your mother as she ages like a mayfly!

“I have been paying for it every day in the trials of my boys, as I watch their instructors drill them again and again and again with the gun and the sword, knowing that if I had been wiser in my youth they would both be part of a healthy Gens, rather than one that cannot even promise them Symbionts! I forgot the General Principles and let myself wander! And since that fateful day, there has been one thing, and only one, that I have not forgotten!”

Senrii was silent. Every fiber of her screamed at her to hide, to run, to grovel, but she stood her ground and waited for the last explosion, wondering if she would be left after it settled.

The answer came sotto voce. “I have not forgotten my duty to my blood,” he whispered. “So tell me, Maga Senrii Generosus Ortus Nethress: can you convince that boy to show you his way into the Archives or not?”