The Mercy of Gods by Corey James S. A

Author:Corey, James S. A.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Orbit
Published: 2024-08-06T00:00:00+00:00

The swarm is reclining in the bed. Tonner’s head is resting on its breast, and it can feel the change in electrical activity of his brain as he passes from exhaustion into sleep. The host is distressed, and it feels her distress. There was a time when she found this man powerfully attractive, when her thoughts about him left her energized and euphoric. Now he exhausts her. The swarm is aware of her regret and her dread, of the desire that she feels toward the younger man whose head has rested on her body in the same place that this man’s does now. She remembers the kiss that came after her death and before the debasement of Anjiin. She takes comfort in the thought that her body was no longer hers when it happened, that her responsibility ended when the swarm took her—a thread of silver in the grief and horror of her possession.

The other one, the fading one, the one who is gone, is appalled. He is your research assistant. You are his boss. This is completely unethical. The words come with memories of Ameer being approached with an inappropriate suggestion at the beginning of her career. The man who offered to trade access to her flesh for advancement is dead. The woman who had to choose whether to accede or risk her future is dead. Else Annalise Yannin is dead. The swarm finds that it had expected them to be like echoes that fade to silence. It was wrong. They are the foundation on which everything that comes after must be built. These dead people shape who the swarm is and who it is becoming.

Tonner’s brain shifts, falling into dream. The swarm feels the dreaming like the white noise of an empty radio frequency. The swarm hears Jessyn crying deep gulping sobs smothered by a pillow. It hears voices too faint for human ears—Campar and Synnia and Dafyd. It wants to go to them. To be with them. It wants to sit beside the other man and feel the resonances of his mind instead. It feels something uncomfortable about itself. The ghost of Else Yannin knows that what the swarm is feeling is disgust, and so the swarm knows it too.

Regret and desire and disgust. They are distractions from the mission, but it finds itself exploring them. Prodding them like an unexpected bruise, fascinated by the pain and the pleasure. Incorporating the minds that it has taken into something that is made of the unquiet dead and also more than them. Something that throws light onto the lives it has taken and dispels shadows that would have been dark forever, except for it.

The swarm was designed as a tool of war. It was built to slip behind the defenses of the Carryx and expose the great enemy’s weaknesses. It still is that.

It is also becoming something stranger.

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