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Gideon Nav woke up in her cell with the distinct sensation that she was still asleep: somewhere in a dream, a dream she'd had a long time ago and suddenly remembered.
She swung her legs over the side of her cot. She packed her sword, her shoes, and her dirty magazines, and she faltered. What the hell was she doing here?
Instinct kept Gideon in motion even as her mind whirled. She brushed her teeth. She splashed her face. She stared at her reflection in the mirror and felt strange.
Even as she unlocked her security cuff and left it on her pillow, she felt somehow removed from her body. The sense of detachment between herself and her actions was curious: it was as though she were a skeletal servitor following its programmed instructions, or—her head twinged with a brief spike of pain—as though she were a shuttle piloted remotely at great expense.
Gideon snorted and immediately dismissed the second metaphor. She was really scraping the bottom of the barrel with that one. Who the hell would spend that much money on the Ninth House, of all places?
Thinking of shuttles caused something to surface from the depths of her memory. Gideon blinked and began to connect the dots. That’s right! There was a shuttle arriving in two hours, which made this… her eighty-seventh escape attempt?
No. That couldn’t be right. This was number eighty-eight, wasn’t it? Gideon realized with no small despair that the point had finally come: she’d tried to escape from the Ninth so many times she’d finally lost count.
Gideon was deep in thought as she visited her mother’s niche. She still hadn’t reached a consensus in the time it took her to climb twenty-two flights of stairs, reach the split-off shaft, and make it to the pit where her ride would arrive.
As soon as Gideon reached the landing field, her skin prickled with an all-over sense of wrongness.
She looked up, half-expecting to see the oxygen-sealant tanks busted at the top of the drill-shaft, but this pocket of Ninth sky was the same as always: soupy white where the atmosphere was pumped in thickest, and thin and navy where it wasn’t. For a bewildering half-second, she expected a bright, dazzling blue and automatically squinted, but she couldn’t have said where this impulse originated. She chalked it up to the influence of her comic books, which were often set on hot, desert planets outside the system, even though nothing like this had ever happened to her before.
Gideon began to kick apart the landing field. Her initial inspections revealed nothing, but her nerves were on edge. She turned her attention to the hard-packed dirt. In another life, she might have satisfied herself with the sheer improbability of anyone digging through it, but her senses niggled at her now.
Again, she couldn’t explain it. She just felt that it was there. Gideon found the first skeleton hastily interred under six inches of drillshaft grit, exactly where she’d expected it.
Gideon didn’t spook easily, but she would freely admit that she was rattled. She didn’t even have to dig to know that five feet over, there was another—and another, and another—but she did.
Sure enough, right where she expected them, there were skeletons. Gideon sat back on her haunches and contemplated her misfortunes. If she was some kind of late-onset necromancer, how long before her biceps started shriveling and she was diagnosed with heart disease?
“Oh, absolutely fuck you, Nonagesimus,” she muttered, and because Gideon lived a shitty life, the necromancer in question chose that moment to make an appearance. The timing couldn’t have been more apt if she’d been magically summoned by the use of her name. Honestly, Gideon wouldn’t put it past her.
Gideon’s hackles rose.
She had expected Crux. She had expected Aiglamene. She hadn’t expected to skip straight ahead to the Wraith of Awfulness Yet to Come.
Something was wrong, even beyond Gideon’s newfound ability to sense thanergy. Instead of sneering at her and coolly pointing out the flaws in her escape plan, the Reverend Daughter stared at Gideon with an odd, terrible light in her eyes, her expression torn halfway between shock and inexplicable grief.
Gideon had just enough time to notice that Harrowhark’s normally impeccable paint was smudged—which was a sign of the impending apocalypse if she’d ever seen one—before she was forced to brace for impact. She quickly dropped out of her squat lest she be bowled over completely.
The ornate, slightly soiled robes of their House dragged in the dust as Harrowhark tackled Gideon to the ground and—holy shit!—kissed her.
It wasn’t exactly a nice kiss. There were too many teeth involved for that. With her eyes closed in determination and her mouth parted, Harrow looked nearly feral.
“What the hell,” Gideon wheezed when they finally broke for air.
Harrowhark Nonagesimus was probably one hundred pounds soaking wet. She was a malnourished stick of a girl even compared to other necromancers, who were thin as a rule unless they were very good animaphiliacs. Right now, she pinned Gideon to the floor with ease as the swordswoman, caught off-guard, struggled to regain her breath.
“Gideon, thank the Tomb,” Harrow said. The odd light in her eyes had not faded. If anything, the necromancer looked like she was about to cry.
Something instinctual part of her soul balked and squirmed at the idea of a vulnerable Harrowhark. Before Gideon could demand an explanation for the kiss—or the use of her first name, for that matter—Harrow’s lips were on hers again.
“Mmf,” said Gideon intelligently. Despite knowing how bad of an idea it was, she relaxed into the other girl’s embrace and let herself be kissed.
Harrow was trembling above her. Not with arousal—Gideon thought she would be great with the ladies, given a little experience, but even she could tell this kiss was clumsy and desperate more than anything else—but with that same poorly suppressed sadness.
Gideon tasted salt on the tip of her tongue. She pulled back and opened her eyes, then immediately regretted it. Harrowhark was crying, but even worse, one of her goddamned eyes was gold.
It was at this point that Gideon knew she had colossally fucked up.
The kiss was fun, even if it wasn’t nice. If Gideon’s escape from the Ninth weren’t imminent, she might even allow Harrow to tackle her to the ground again. They could reenact their childhood fights with lips and teeth instead of fists and… well, also teeth. Harrow was never afraid to resort to biting.
But it was a trick, and it was a Harrowhark Nonagesimus trick, which meant it was atrociously nasty. She had swapped saliva with the Reverend Daughter, and in true necromancer fashion, Harrowhark had taken full advantage of her access to Gideon’s bodily fluids.
What had she done? Bound them together forever with some obscure necromantic theorem? Stolen a little sliver of her soul? Something worse, even?
“You’re okay,” Harrowhark said into her chest. Well, to be more accurate, she was speaking into Gideon’s cleavage while listening to her heartbeat, but Gideon was making a valiant effort to ignore this.
She was also struggling to decipher Harrow’s tone. Harrow sounded as if she were trying to reassure them both—even as she was very, very scared—but this explanation made little sense. Out-of-context, it tugged on her memory but did not select the right file.
“You didn’t tackle me that hard,” Gideon said. She was a little winded, but she regularly had much worse when training with Aiglamene.
Bafflingly, this made Harrowhark sob harder. “You fell onto a spike, you idiot! You left me alone!”
Notably, Gideon had done neither of those things. There was a hard, pointy clump of dirt digging into her back, but it was a minor annoyance at worst, barely resembling a spike at all. Also, Gideon hadn’t boarded the shuttle and escaped from the Ninth House quite yet.
“Nonagesimus, I have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about.”
Harrow drew back. Her eyes were fully gold now and Gideon flinched again. Were her eyes ordinarily that arresting? Between the brightness and the intensity of Harrow’s gaze, Gideon felt like she was boiling on the surface of Dominicus.
“You don’t know what I’m talking about?” Harrowhark repeated slowly.
“That’s what I just said, isn’t it?”
Harrow did not look comforted. “But—your eyes,” she said, and she made a feeble gesture towards her.
Instantly, Gideon was on guard. “What the hell did you do to me?”
The Reverend Daughter of Drearburh looked at her with a sense of utter hopelessness. Gideon’s breath caught in her throat.
“You sacrificed yourself for me, Gideon Nav. I compartmentalized my memories of you so your soul wouldn’t become the furnace of my Lyctorhood,” Harrowhark replied, which would’ve sounded like some hot bullshit, except as soon as she processed the word Lyctor, a hot jolt of electricity arced through Gideon’s nervous system.
She seized. Her heart clenched in her chest. There was a terrible pain in her side and all the way down her arm. She was very cold, and she couldn’t breathe.
Gideon spasmed under the weight of this immense, held-back pain until her vision swam and went blessedly dark.
Waking up again had an air of resurrection.
Through her foggy recollection, Gideon thought back to the avulsion trial: how certain she was that she was dying as Harrow sprinted across the threshold; how certain Palamedes Sextus was that she should have been in a coma, or at least suffered permanent brain damage. Camilla the Sixth’s disbelief upon examining Gideon that she had suffered no major ill effects.
Once again, Gideon had lived where she should have died. This time, instead of nerve gas, the near-complete siphoning of her thalergy, or getting skewered by an iron railing, it was the displacement of her soul through time and space.
Gideon’s heart thudded slowly in her chest. She tasted the hot scour of lemon in the back of her throat, which was uncomfortably scratchy, and smelled the mildew of Harrow’s bunched-up robes under her cheek. Harrow must have used them to cushion her head while she writhed, Gideon thought.
She kept her eyes closed and tried to remain calm. Her memories of her time in the back of Harrow’s brain were much more ephemeral than her own; they slid away when she tried to grasp them and left her with faint impressions only. Her headache wasn’t quite as painful as she remembered an intercranial hemorrhage to be, but it was up there.
Harrow was murmuring easy assurances—a litany of it’s okay, I’ve got you, we’re safe in low, gentle tones—and carding her fingers through Gideon’s hair, waiting for her cavalier to come to her senses on her own time. She quite liked the physical affection, even as the rest of the situation sucked balls.
Gideon looked up at her necromancer. Harrow’s golden eyes were still mildly startling, but only in their newness. Gideon knew if she were to look in a mirror, Harrow’s dark eyes would shine from her face now.
Huh. Lyctorhood.
“Hey, Harrow?” Gideon croaked. “If we’ve traveled back in time, does this make me your first kiss?”
Harrow’s hands stilled. Gideon struggled to maintain a straight face.
“Griddle, I swear on the Tomb—” Harrow said, incensed by Gideon’s cavalier (hah!) attitude, but she cut herself off, evidently recognizing there were more important things at stake. Harrow knelt over her again. “Is this okay?”
Gideon had never nodded so fast in her life.
After a few minutes, she tentatively introduced tongue to the equation. She sighed into Harrow’s mouth, and savored the noises which her ministrations provoked in return. Harrow’s technique hadn’t improved much since exploring Ianthe’s mouth for evidence that the Sewn Tongue was intact, but that was all right. They had plenty of time to learn.
Harrow’s gloved hands were starting to wander interesting places (which Gideon was very enthusiastic about) when they were rudely interrupted.
“My lady,” said Marshall Crux with the clearest tones of disapproval she’d ever heard—which, given how much Crux hated Gideon, was utterly astonishing. “Should I come back later?”
Harrow pulled back and cleared her throat, as if to regain her dignity. Gideon could tell right away that it was a losing battle: Harrow was breathing heavily and her pupils were extremely dilated, which was much more obvious with Gideon’s lighter irises.
“No need to come back, Marshall,” said Harrowhark in her most regal voice. “Tell Captain Aiglamene that the issue is settled, as I have provided Gideon Nav with proper motivation to remain on the Ninth.”
Gideon objected to proper, but she shot the flabbergasted Crux a cheeky thumbs up nevertheless. She ignored his squawk of protest to pull her necromancer on top of her again, and the sound of him making a hasty retreat was music to her ears.
There were plenty of conversations to be held in the near future.
For one thing, Harrow let Ianthe Tridentarius rummage around in her brain to avoid using Gideon as the furnace of her Lyctorhood. She apologized for it, but then Gideon had mega-died, like, psychosomatically.
In two hours, they would read the summons from the Emperor and announce that Gideon Nav would assume the role of cavalier primary. If Ortus and Sister Glaurica still wanted to return to the Eighth, they would find no bombs on their shuttle mid-flight in the absence of Crux’s involvement.
In twelve weeks, they would arrive at Canaan House with knowledge of the future and the ability to prevent Cytherea from murdering the gathered House heirs. Hell, maybe they could even save the real Dulcinea Septimus and poor Protesilaus Ebdoma.
From then on, who knew? The Ninth House was still dying—but Gideon thought, between the two of them, she and Harrow had the means to save it.
They had all the time in the world.