Novel Full Chapter 1074: The Throne of Clouds
Chapter 1074: The Throne of Clouds
A small, screen rectangle hung in the air in front of her at a comfortable reading angle.
On it, Ava's face.
"You look obnoxiously comfortable," Ava said, dry and fond. "Where are you?"
"Somewhere over the Pacific. I forget exactly."
"You forget. You never do!"
"I lost track. I was thinking."
"About what?"
"Many things." ARIA smiled, small and private. "Tell me about your trip. Two days you have been gone. I have been patient. I have earned the debrief, right?"
Ava snorted. On her end of the call, she was in what appeared to be a hotel suite—nice but generic, one of those anonymous rooms an agency tucked its people into when it didn't want them in the local field office.
Little did they know she had enough money to buy the entire building now as Peter's woman.
She was in a soft hoodie, hair up, no makeup but still a beauty of a Goddess just like his other women after feeding her the Divine Seed. But even a beauty like her was a human... she had tired signs around the eyes—like she had spent forty-eight hours being polite to superiors she didn't trust.
"They loved me," Ava said. "They loved me so much I almost felt bad for them."
"The drone gifts worked, huh?"
"The drones worked. Three of them. When I unloaded them out of the back of the transport the entire HQ went quiet and the CIA assistant director too. You know the way a room goes quiet when the thing being presented is too good to be true—that kind of quiet.
"They sent me into a hangar with the CIA director and two high generals and had me walk them through every surface feature. Stealth profile. Flight envelope. Payload capacity. The drop-pod package for the ground units. I gave them two full hours of presentation, answered every question they threw at me, watched their eyeballs glaze over and un-glaze twice, and by the end of it they were asking me when they could meet Eros."
ARIA's foot stopped swinging. Lifted an eyebrow.
"Oh?"
"Director wanted him in a room within seventy-two hours. Two generals seconded it. Said they wanted to shake his hand. Said they wanted to 'understand the mind behind the platform.'" Ava rolled her eyes. "You know. The usual flattery the suits use when they want to be able to tell their bosses they've met a god that would solve all their problems."
"And?"
"And I told them what you told me to tell them." Ava gave her a small pointed look. "That Eros prefers to stay out of most people's eyes. That he does his best work as a mystery. That if they wanted his continued goodwill on future deliveries, they would accept the drones through me and let the man remain, for their purposes, a rumor.
"I said it with the right amount of mild regret. They accepted it with the right amount of mild disappointment. Nobody pushed."1
"Good girl."
"Do not good girl me."
"You like it."
"I hate that I like it."
ARIA laughed—warm, small, delighted. Her foot started swinging again.
"And the testing?"
"That's what they're doing right now. They have a whole secure facility out in the desert and a little team of very smug engineers who are currently taking the drones apart and putting them back together and congratulating themselves on how cleverly they are reverse-engineering the architecture."
Ava tilted her head. "They are not reverse-engineering the architecture."
"They are not."
"They are about six layers deep in what they think is the architecture, and they have not yet noticed that every layer they crack open is a decoy, and every decoy is pointing them toward a different wrong conclusion."
ARIA's smile widened.
"They cannot touch the scope of what I put in those drones," she said. "Not even a quarter of it. Not an eighth. They think they're looking at the most advanced platform anyone on this planet has ever fielded, and they are correct about that, and they are also approximately three hundred years of development cycle away from understanding the parts of it that are actually doing the work.
"What they have is what I allowed them to have. What I allowed them to have is exactly what will make them feel clever for the next decade while I read their mail."
Ava laughed. Shook her head. "Can you blame them, though?"
"No. I cannot. They are doing their best."
"That is the most condescending thing I've ever heard you say."
"It was meant warmly."
"It was meant goddess-ly."
"That is not a word."
"It is now."
ARIA leaned back further into her cloud. Rested one elbow along the armrest. The moonlight caught the curve of her cheek and the edge of her jaw, and for a moment the whole thing looked less like a video call and more like a painting someone had hung in the stratosphere and walked away from.
"How are you, Ava."
The question was quieter than the others. Different weight, Ava blinked once and looked down before she looked back up.
"I'm fine."
"You are not fine."
"I'm fine-ish."
"Better."
"How is everyone. How is Peter. How is my sister. How is—how is the house. How is all of it."
"Everyone is well. Your sister has been redecorating one of the guest wings without permission and being overprotective of Peter's women. I am letting her. She has good taste and strong opinions.
"Peter is currently at a young woman's house being unexpectedly charming to her mother. The rest are scattered across the estate, preparing for Paris. Madison is terrorizing a chef. Genevieve, the new woman, is reading in the library with Eziel asleep on her lap. Rebecca flew flying out this morning. Linda is asking after you."
Ava's eyes softened. Then sharpened, because that was what Ava did when her eyes softened too much. "I could call."
"You could."
"I won't."
"I know."
"Especially him."
"Especially him?" ARIA tilted her head, amused. "Explain."
"If I call him, I'll come back."
"You are supposed to come back. That is the plan."
"Not yet. Not until the testing wraps. And I know me. If I get on the phone with him for even five minutes, I'll be on a plane that night."
ARIA's smile turned teasing. She tapped one long finger against her lip in exaggerated contemplation.
"Ava. Is this be the same Ava who sat across from him in a restaurant in Miami, arms crossed, jaw set, informing me in that cool little professional voice of hers that he would not be sweeping her off her feet, that she was immune to that particular variety of charm, that she had, in her words—and I am quoting, because I catalogued it at the time for precisely this occasion—'seen his type before'?"
"Don't."
"The same Ava who lectured me, unprompted, for three full minutes about the foolishness of women who fell for men with too much money and too much confidence?"
"Don't, ARIA."
"The same Ava who now cannot place a phone call to him because she is afraid—legitimately, professionally afraid—that the sound of his voice over a speaker will cause her to breach the continental United States within the hour?"
"I will reach through this screen."
"A lovesick idiot," ARIA concluded fondly. "That is the correct diagnosis. I am sorry to confirm it."
"You are not sorry."
"I am not sorry."
"I hate you."
"You love me."
"Both. At the same time. In perfect balance." Ava scrubbed a hand down her face, laughing in spite of herself. "Why did you even call me, you menace?"
ARIA uncrossed her legs. Recrossed them the other way. The cloud beneath her reshaped itself to accommodate the change with the patient reluctance of upholstery that had opinions.
"Ah. Yes. That."
"That? That what."
"I need you to set up a meeting for me."
"With whom."
"Your bosses."
Ava's face went slowly still of a professional when the conversation had, without warning, turned into a briefing.
"My bosses."
"Your bosses."
"Which bosses."
"The one who signs off when the agency wants to buy or sell land in politically awkward parts of the world. The one who would have the discretion to facilitate a quiet transaction outside normal channels. That one."
Ava's eyebrows rose. Slowly.
"ARIA."
"Mm."
"What are you buying."
ARIA smiled.
The smile was very small and very warm and very quietly sharp—like a blade being unwrapped from silk.
"An island," she said.
****
Beneath the island, in the chamber the world above did not know existed, three figures knelt.
The chamber had no floor.
What they knelt upon was the suggestion of one—a plane of polished black stone that looked solid only where the light chose to rest on it, and dissolved into a bottomless gold shimmer everywhere the light did not. No ceiling either. No walls.
Whatever shaped this place was not made of architecture; it was made of attention.
Divine Essence rendered into a room only because rooms were a kindness to visitors still wearing bodies.
And at the far end of it—if far had meaning here—an Eye burned.
It filled the space entire. Vast. Unblinking. A long wide oval of living gold, so bright at its edges that the gold bled outward in slow writhing tendrils, each tendril softening as it reached into the black void around the Eye until it faded into darkness.
The pupil at its center was a vertical slit, black as unmade night, and the slit pulsed—in time with something none of them could hear but all of them could feel.
Senithe pressed her forehead to the not-floor.
Surgical Ava at work