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“What do you want with me, Margalis?”
    I stooped and let my right hand—my human hand, that vestige of flesh and corruption the Ascendant biotechs had left me—brush the stony ground. In the darkness I could detect living things by their heat: the red blur of a kit fox on a nearby ridge, the tiny boreal owls like glowing fists roosting upon the prickly pear, crickets and wolf spiders marking a frayed crimson carpet across the sand. I waited for a cricket to approach me and then swept it up to my face. When I opened my palm, it lay there quite still, its long antennae tickling the warm air. It had three eyes; in daylight they would not appear bright red but sea-blue, and larger than a cricket’s eyes should be. In this part of the Republic everything had suffered some mutation, though not everything was as obviously stricken as this creature. I waved my hand and it leapt into the darkness.
    “What do I want with you?” I waited until the cricket’s little trajectory ended, then turned back to Nefertity. “I have told you: I want to find the military-command nemosyne. I want to find Metatron.”
    “Metatron.” If she could have, she would have spat. “You must have been mad when you were human, Margalis. I have told you, I know nothing of Metatron. I am a folklore unit, the repository of women’s tales and histories. And you have told me that all of the others of my kind were destroyed—”
    “I don’t believe Metatron was destroyed. It was too valuable; they would have found some way to bring it to safety somewhere, to preserve it.”
    They were the Ascendant Autocracy. The rebel angels who stormed heaven after the Second Shining, the stellar Aviators who commandeered the HORUS space stations and created the net of offworld alliances that even now carried out its mad and futile campaigns to bring the world under a single government. Metatron was the glory of that earlier age, the shining sapphire in the technocrats’ crown. The most elaborate and sophisticated weapons system ever devised, a nemosyne that commanded the vast submersible fleet and squadrons of Gryphons and fougas and the celestial warships called the elÿon. The Military Tactical Targets Retrieval Network. MTTRN: Metatron.
    A joke, Sajur Panggang had explained to me back at the Academy. He was a year older than I, and as an Orsina—a cousin, but still of their blood—he was being trained in such arcane matters, rather than for combat.
    “I read about it, in a book,” he said. That alone was testimony of Metatron’s strange lineage. Like so much of the Prime Ascendants’ lore, the name hearkened back to ancient times, a religion long dead. Metatron, the leader of the host of fiery angels; but also Satan-El, the Fallen One. Metatron, the breath of whose wings brings death, and who has countless, all-seeing eyes.
    “It was destroyed when Wichita fell.” Nefertity’s voice cut through my dreaming. She gazed out at the little valley below us. “That was what Loretta said: it was the one good that came from that Shining.”
    I shook my head. “It was not in Wichita. There are records at the Academy that show it was brought to the old capital, to Crystal City. There were bunkers there that could withstand a thousand Shinings.”
    “But it was not in the capital.” The nemosyne’s eyes glittered green and gold, sentient stars plucked from the sky. “You died there searching for it.”
    “You are right. It was not in the City of Trees; but that does not mean it was destroyed. I believe it was stolen by rebel janissaries and brought to safety.”
    I tilted my head back until I commanded a view of the sky: the stars cool and unmoving on that field of blue-black, broken here and there by shimmering traces of gold where the atmosphere had been torn by celestial warfare. “I believe it is up there.”
    The nemosyne followed my gaze. In the western aspect of the sky a pallid star slowly moved through the constellation 201 Sikorsky, that which