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Chapter Text

“Kiriona,” her father says, to let her know she’s zoning out. Across the table, his plate is empty and his mug is just the pale dregs of tea. On her own plate a piece of toast has gone soggy under a congealing heap of spaghetti, the untouched noodles on top laid inelegantly in the shape of a winky face. The mug of tea in her hands feels the same as it did when it was set down in front of her, but it’s not steaming anymore.

She doesn’t get why he makes her come to his quarters for breakfast, and then makes her breakfast. He knows she can’t eat it.

“Sorry,” she says, and doesn’t mean it.

Those fucked up eyes are fixed on her. The attention would be predatory, if he wasn’t such a dripping mop of a person all the time. He asks, “Where do you go?”

Because she never mastered impulse control, she taps her temple and says, “Got a mental catalog of top ten greatest tits.”

God smiles demurely into his tea as if he’s got a secret. “Like father, like daughter.”

She recoils. “Oh, YUCK. No. I don’t go anywhere. Just…away.”

For half a second he looks wistful. “My little red balloon.” He reaches out to pat one of her hands, cold as the tea, with his. “I’m glad you’re tethered here with us. I’d hate to lose you again.”

You’re the one who tied me down, she doesn’t say. She also doesn’t say, nobody’s ever wanted to hold on to me before.

They both taste like lies, sticky on the back of her tongue.

“I’d like it if you would check on your sister today.” He squeezes her hand, compressing her knuckles together, and she can actually feel that as much as see it. “I haven’t seen her all week. I think she’s avoiding me.”

Definitely longer than a week. Ianthe’s been scarce since almost a month ago, when Gideon woke up pinned awkwardly into her own dead body like twenty-seven unrelated beads of oss strung in a single rosary, the new favorite child of the Emperor Undying. Ianthe is probably avoiding her too.

“Yeah, okay,” she says anyway.

***

Except…she doesn’t actually give a shit what Ianthe’s up to. She puts it off. Jogs a few restless loops around deck four instead, which is about as pleasant as jogging around the snow leek fields—except there are people, and they make way when they see her coming, saluting sharply even if she’s already passed them multiple times. Which is…something. Is this how Harrow felt on the Ninth, with every agéd penitent in the hallway bending to kiss the hem of her robes?

The thought burns; flinching away, she cuts her jog short and heads to the training room.

The Seat of the Emperor has, she’s been told, one of the most impressive training facilities in the fleet. There are any number of things to lift or pull or punch or brace against, and she’s tried them all. No gains—her body doesn’t change anymore, no matter what she does—but the exertion helps when she feels muffled, like she’s piloting her corpse through three layers of sackcloth. She can punch a heavy bag until she starts to feel her individual knuckles again; rack higher and higher weights on the fancy machines and work every muscle group until they’re all trembling.

But if she has to deal with Tridentarius, she wants to be sharp. She straps her new white knuckle knives onto her hand, draws her gleaming white rapier, and takes out her irritation on the sturdiest training pell. None of the other soldiers here have offered to spar with her, and she refuses to ask—they can’t really challenge her as she is now, and she doesn’t want to hurt them.

Ianthe, though. They can’t really do each other lasting damage, and she always wanted that rematch against Tern. She’d like to have someone to fight, a living, breathing person, even if her opponent is possibly the worst person in the Dominicus system.

She thrashes the pell until the afternoon training crowd starts to filter in; the padding around the post is shredded from her efforts, but it’ll be replaced by tomorrow. It always is.

Kiriona Gaia settles her pristine weapons back on her belt, and goes to find a Lyctor.

***

She's never actually been inside Ianthe's quarters on the ship. She knows where they are, generally; her dad gave her a rambling tour as soon as she could pilot her own legs well enough to walk, introducing her to a stream of people whose names and jobs she definitely does not remember, and pointing out locations he thought would be of interest. The library (full of nerds), the mess (an exercise in frustration), the training room (appealing but overwhelming). Ianthe's been assigned, she recalls, directly across the ship from Kiriona, in the aft section of deck eight.

The bustle of the midship common areas eases as she moves further back; it’s dimmer here to conserve power, and the hum and vibration of the propulsion systems are more pronounced—she can feel it, just barely, in her back teeth. She hates that she finds the lighting and the hum and the narrow hallways comforting. She wonders if she can negotiate a swap. Living at the ass end of the ship surrounded by storage holds doesn't seem particularly Third, or particularly Ianthe.

Yet as she nears the Lyctor’s hall, she’s brought up short by a distressingly moist-looking membranous barrier webbed from floor to ceiling, which is nasty, and very Ianthe. It’s thin enough to let a little light glow through, like holding flimsy up to a lamp, but everything on the other side is obscured. It’s clear that her sister prince wants privacy.

Well, fuck her. A quick rapier slice is enough to bisect the membrane from corner to corner; it gaps open like a squeezed coin purse, and she ducks through.

There’s a bodylength of open hallway on the other side—maybe less—before the path is blocked again by a closed fire door. From the fire door to the midpoint of the hall, a scrollwork of blood wards has been daubed all over the walls, and across the ceiling and the floor. Gideon’s seen enough blood in her life to know it's less than a day old, layered over the flaked-off remains and stains of older wards. She doesn’t know shit about wards really, but something about this one, about its shapes and the way it flows, prickles at her memory. She approaches, clenching her jaw against a phantom twinge, a little shudder of something up the back of her skull, and extends her hand.

White dust and sparks burst around her fingers as the field eats away her glove in uneven chunks and then, finding no access through her impenetrable skin, desiccates her fingernails. It doesn’t feel like much, really—but she remembers its like well enough, and jerks her hand back out of reflex.

Her fingernails don’t right themselves; two of them fall off. She curses feelingly: “Gross.” Then, uselessly: “What the fuck, Tridentarius!”

No answer comes, and she weighs her options. On the one hand, who actually cares what the Saint of Awe is doing? Not her. On the other, Dad did ask. He’s been making noises about giving her real Cohort responsibilities to go with the crisp uniform and the made-up titles he already bestowed. The ship is returning to the front; how can she convince him to let her see some action like she always wanted, if she doesn’t do the least thing he asks of her? And either way, she wants a sparring partner.

Still, she knows what this kind of field does. Even if her skin is immune to the senescence, by the time she gets the fire door open she’ll be naked and probably hairless, and that’s a grotty look—not to mention the possibility that it would suck all the moisture from her eyeballs. It’s like a puzzle set out specifically to piss her off; it makes her want to go back to bed.

She sinks down to the floor instead, her back propped against the wall at the edge of the barrier. Pulls her now-fingerless glove off and feeds it into the field little by little to watch it puff into dust. Maybe she can wait Ianthe out. She must still be eating, sometimes. Slipping out for coffee, or whatever else sustains her slimy depravity. Apples? But that vague memory is tinged with Harrow, curled up in Ianthe’s bed, and the wrecked insides of her chest throb like an achy tooth.

She tosses the rest of her glove into the field and yanks off the other. Who cares? She can’t get blisters anymore.

When her gloves are both disintegrated she goes back to fingers, watching in fascination as the ward vaporizes the fine hairs just below the knuckles and then struggles against God’s will settled over her flesh. Sparks pop, and citrus scent scalds her nose. She’s debating between throwing in some of the ugly braid on her jacket or a few excessively shiny buttons next when the fire door slams open.

“Gonad,” says her sister prince, with less venom and more weariness than anticipated. Ianthe looks worse than usual; the matching Cohort whites they were both fitted for a month ago are sagging off her as though she shrunk herself in the wash, and the bags under her eyes are dark as the Tomb. She scowls dully as Kiriona pokes through the barrier again in a fresh shower of sparks. “Stop fingering my ward and toddle off to play somewhere else.”

“Why did you ward the whole damn hallway?”

“Privacy.” She drawls this like it’s innuendo, but her face doesn’t match the tone.

“You look like shit.”

“What do you want.”

Kiriona Gaia gets to her feet. She more than makes up in bulk what Ianthe holds over her in height, and she squares her shoulders, cocks her head. “I was gonna say fight me, but.” A pointed up-and-down look; Ianthe’s shoulders draw together in agitation. “Wouldn’t be a very fair fight.” The bloodless mouth thins, compressed. “I think even one of those scrawny new necros from the Caelus could fuck you up right now.” A click of gilded bone as Ianthe’s fists tighten. “Hell, a baby could—”

“Fine.”

***

She feels…something, as they walk the halls. Distantly, like hearing keys jangling in a room out of sight and knowing someone is approaching. A sense memory of old adrenaline.

The dueling ring in the back half of the training room clears out as they approach; soldiers scatter, magnetized and repulsed, into loose ranks of spectators. A murmur rises as Prince Ianthe Naberius steps into the center, and Prince Kiriona Gaia follows her.

“To the death?” Ianthe offers, drawing her rapier and fastidiously eyeing the blade.

Kiriona snorts; tightens the fastening of her knuckle knives. “I’m already there.”

“A technicality. What would you suggest instead?”

“To the floor. No exceptions.”

“You’re a backwater brute, Gonad.” But the other prince lifts her voice to call: “Ianthe the First. Three paces.” She takes them, stride long, and turns with her rapier perfectly steady and her offhand—that damn trident knife—held gleaming across her chest.

“Kiriona the First.” Three paces of her own, and the feeling that might be excitement fizzes up somewhere in her empty chest.

As she turns, a tiny, attenuated figure steps pointedly inside the ring of spectators. For half a second—

But it’s just one of the Fourth who came aboard last week, an adept with a frizz of brown hair braided tightly back. She’s got a lieutenant commander’s pips on her unbuttoned jacket—so either she’s older than her baby face suggests, or she’s seen action and handled herself well. Either seems possible from her bearing; she’s watching Kiriona with carefully blank expectation, and nods as she settles into her ready stance. “Begin,” says the lieutenant.

Ianthe strikes first and fast, like an agitated snake; Gideon blocks, turns her blade aside, and sinks into that floaty, underwater headspace of a fight she knows she can win.

Not that Tridentarius isn’t good—she is, better than her blowhard cavalier ever was, precise and slick and vicious. But Kiriona is better, too. Stronger than she was alive, if a fraction slower. There’s a weight to her God-enhanced corpse that’s new, an immovable sort of density, and she wasn’t exactly featherweight before.

They pass blows back and forth without any banter, barely even breathing; Ianthe’s knife slices through her jacket and into her shirt, but can’t break the skin of her stomach; Kiriona’s rapier pierces her shoulder and arcs blood across the ring, but the wound heals immediately. They’re well-matched—until Ianthe starts to tire.

It’s in her footwork first, just barely off-balance, enough to stand out; then it’s in her gold-shod arm, resetting too low, and a fine tremble in her offhand. It’s in her eyes, her cold and bruised expression, and Gideon feels a flare of nasty satisfaction chased by a cool trickle of shame. She should end this. Maybe she shouldn’t have asked in the first place.

In that moment of distraction, Prince Ianthe Naberius lunges for her throat; the strike is perfectly placed, fierce and steady. It’s mean. A memory flickers across the insides of her eyes, white and red and gray; Prince Kiriona Gaia steps into the thrust and lets it pass through her pristine ascot and then right through the cauterized wound in her throat. Another step to place her foot, a twist and a sweep of her own arm—and Ianthe, caught off guard, is swung light as an empty sack over Kiriona’s hip and sent crashing to the floor.

She squeals like a teakettle going down, but doesn’t let go of the rapier; Kiriona follows and plants a knee on her sternum, and allows herself a grin.

“Match to Her Divine Highness,” calls the Fourth lieutenant.

“Get off me, you overdressed pincushion,” spits her sister prince, but that sting can’t quite overcome Kiriona’s sudden and immense satisfaction. She rises, adjusting her now-punctured scarf to hide the tear.

“Hey, you’re the one who went for my hole. And we’re dressed the same.”

“Goodnight,” says Ianthe coolly as she levers to her feet; she sheathes her weapons and strides away without a glance back, parting the crowd of onlookers like she’s wrapped in a plex bubble.

Beside her, a voice murmurs, “Golly.” It’s the scrawny arbitrator; up close it’s clear she’s painfully young, but she’s already got a ragged scar licking the side of her eye and disappearing into her hair. She looks up at Kiriona with a calculating sort of admiration, and something about it tickles the back of her brain. “Never seen a duel like that before.”

“Thanks for calling it, Lieutenant…”

“Arba. The maintenance crew will be glad you’ve found a person to thrash, sir, instead of the pells. Princes probably don’t have to worry about reserving ring space, either.”

“Reserving..?”

“There’s a sign-up sheet,” Arba says, pointing to a sheet of flimsy tacked on the wall. “I was here to see Ensign Tawa and Lieutenant Saith, but this was way more interesting.”

“Oh,” says Gideon, feeling stupidly wrongfooted. “I’ll sign up next time.”

Lieutenant Arba’s eyes light almost comically. “I’ll organize a betting pool.”

***

A battle-ready ship never quiets. “Day” and “night” made more sense after having spent a few weeks in the circadian rhythm of Canaan House, but Gideon spent the nineteen years of her life before that point at the bottom of a dark hole that sunlight rarely reached, ruled by the arbitrary timings of bells. So she understands the patterns; the Cohort schedules everything like clockwork, and she tries to follow along. Hangover breakfasts with the Emperor and tagging along to his meetings mean she’s on daytime duty, so at night she returns to her room and pretends to sleep.

She did sleep, at first. When hauling her own limbs around was new and newly exhausting, she’d lay on her bed in full uniform because she hadn’t gotten the hang of buttons yet, finally in the dark alone after a day of an existence so unreal it felt hallucinatory, and just pass the fuck out. But she dreamed. Every night.

The murky green of water. Red glowing pinpricks and shadowed white bone. The mismatched blacks of Ninth House hand-me-downs soaked to uniform color; the mismatched blacks of pupil

and iris, twin singularities widening, widening. Clinging cold seeping through her layers, and the clinging heat of hands fisted in her shirt, of anguished breaths against her neck, of paint-smeared skin under her lips, creased by endless scowling—

She always woke with salt in her mouth, so she learned to Go Away instead. Like closing her eyes against a bright light, except closing her everything. Now, every night, Kiriona floats blank and still outside herself for the recommended six to seven hours and calls it good.

***

God’s tea has liquor in it, and the admirals can definitely tell. Sarpedon keeps eyeing the tilt of the leaves-and-baby-fingers crown, which slips two degrees every time God knocks it while rubbing his temple as though this meeting is the most tedious thing to have ever happened in the history of his universe. Given the level of tilt, his drink might actually be more alcohol than tea, and Kiriona resists the powerful urge to make sure her matching crown is straight.

Her matching crown. What the fuck is her afterlife?

She tries to focus on the conversation instead. “...need reinforcements to take back our barracks in the capital,” Admiral Mole-on-her-earlobe from the Fifth is saying. “We can’t keep retreating, the planet’s more than half desert already.”

“Then it’s all the more crucial that we strike in the fullest force we can without giving them time to prepare, wipe the Edenites out of the city and resume resettlement procedure,” says Admiral Stick-up-his-ass from the Third, whose features are permanently arranged to give the impression that he’s just touched something icky.

Admiral Sarpedon, the only one whose name she remembers because he pants after her dad like a faithful dog in a comic book, leans in to scowl. “How can we strike in full force when we don’t have sufficient intelligence on Blood of Eden’s movements?” Then he turns to the Emperor, whose crown has reached an inappropriately rakish angle. “My Lord, we’ll be back within shuttle distance in less than twelve hours. We should organize a landing party to rendezvous with the capital force command, restock their supplies, assess the situation, and report back. It’s a waste of good soldiers to send reinforcements in blind.”

“I’ll go,” Kiriona says, and the room is suddenly focused on her—though only her father, Sarpedon, and the straight-backed admiral from the Second actually meet her eyes. She pulls the side of her mouth into a grin, trying for an angle as rakish as the listing crown. “Might boost morale, or whatever.”

God looks at her for what feels like a myriad. Long enough that she has time to wonder if his eyes are bloodshot from the booze, hidden by the lightless black sclera. “Bring your sister,” he says at last. Then, to the admirals, in a tone like a dismissal: “Put together a team, and draft an address for the Princes.”

The Emperor has spoken; flimsy shuffles and tablets go dark. Sarpedon, lingering, claps Kiriona on the shoulder too familiarly. “I’ve got money on your duel this evening,” he says.

Her father’s eyes are still on her, like he’s trying to pin her to the floor but he can’t quite remember how. Somehow his gaze has that effect anyway. “Duel?”

“Your Princes have been dueling every evening for a week, my Lord,” Sarpedon says with ingratiating jollity. “I’m planning to watch this match myself, if you’d care to join me.”

At last John’s eyes flick away from her. “Is that so? Well, I can’t be seen betting against either of my children.” He smiles, a loose, fermented grin. “But yes, I’ll join you.”

“I’ll see you then, my Lord,” says Sarpedon, with the treacley cadence of It’s a date.

Old people are the worst.

***

Ianthe floored her in their second duel, quick and ruthless, with a smirk like she’d learned all her opponent’s tricks. She hadn’t. She’s good, but her skill comes from Naberius, who was a show pony, and the Saint of Patience, who was Fifth. Gideon trained with Aiglamene, whose ravaged face could be in a dictionary next to the definition of “aggressor.” She wallops Ianthe in their third match, then ekes out a win in the fourth. They’re each getting to know the other’s style, the ways they move, the tactics of every twitch and feint. Ianthe’s slack exhaustion hasn’t eased, but her disdain has, shifting through spite into a kind of cathartic glee—as if some stagnant well of rage has found a crevice through which to drain.

Kiriona doesn’t care, except that it makes for a better fight. Her capacity for feeling things has been hovering close to zero; she can fake it, but a show of empathy isn’t high on her list.

Her sister prince, obsequious and equally fake, bows to the Necromancer Divine in his prime spot on the sidelines; the spectating crowd has left a polite bodylength of space around him that only Sarpedon invades. “Let’s have a clean match, children,” he calls, with the barest slurred edge, shildren.

Lieutenant Arba clears her throat. “To the floor. Disarm legal, no exceptions. Call.”

“Kiriona the First.”

“Ianthe the First.”

“Seven paces back,” says the Lieutenant into the sudden hush of the room. “Turn. Begin.”

It shouldn’t be any different, with God watching. But it is. Ianthe is sharper, somehow whetted by his presence; Kiriona feels his eyes like a bag over her head, a full-body muffling that has her stumbling back and parrying like she’s fighting through soup. She tries to rally—catches Ianthe full in the kidney with the knuckle knives but her sister prince just snarls—with chill fury Ianthe shoves the trident knife home in the open wound in Kiriona’s abdomen, she keeps fucking going for her goddamn holes, and wedges it open to hold Kiriona where she wants her like a fork in a piece of meat. Their rapier blades screech together in an agonizing slide, a battle Ianthe can’t win on brute strength and she knows it, so she twists her wrist in and down and bashes the pommel up under Kiriona’s chin. It doesn’t even hurt—but Ianthe’s wasted necro body still has a little muscle built up, enough to knock Kiriona just a fraction off kilter. She twists away—can’t get loose of that fucking knife—Ianthe’s foot kicks sharply at hers and her knee buckles with a bright, raw pop—and she’s on the floor with Ianthe’s boot on the back of her neck, collapsed like a dropped skeleton construct.

“Match to Her Holiness, the Saint of Awe,” comes the call, over a burst bubble of cheers and disappointed groans and nervous chatter. She has a sense, from far away, that her knee is screaming; the familiar smell of blood and bone dust is in her nose.

Then someone shoves her onto her back by the shoulder, and she remembers that she’s aboard the Emperor’s Toilet, in the training room, in a body that no longer bleeds or feels pain. All the tethers that hold her soul in place have come a little loose; Ianthe stands over her, watching her with eyes as glittery-hard as stones, and then God squats down at her hip with an expression like she’s a duvet that’s gotten scrunched up and tangled in its cover.

“Let’s reinforce that knee, hmm? Should’ve done it sooner, it was in pieces when we got you back.” A tap, somewhere below her line of sight—then the scouring wash of citrus through her sinuses, sour on the back of her tongue. Her tethers tighten again; her knee, when she sits up, bends just as it should. “There you are,” the Emperor says with a pleased, modest smile. “All shined up for your mission tomorrow.”

“Mission?” says Ianthe, in a tone of poorly veiled and covetous resentment.

“For both of you,” says God, as if he’s arranged a playdate. “There’s a briefing tomorrow, at…” He fumbles in his pockets for his tablet.

“Oh seven thirty hours,” says Admiral Sarpedon, tucking his wallet back into his jacket as he joins the humiliating tableau of people standing over Kiriona’s floored corpse.

“Yes. Oh seven thirty.” The Emperor gets to his feet; sways minutely until the admiral subtly grips his elbow. “I’ll see you at breakfast, girls.”

Ianthe lingers after he’s gone, fussing at the bloody slits the knuckles made in her jacket. “I only have one clean uniform left,” she drawls, displeased. “So no knifing me in the back on this mission, whatever it is.”

“Antioch. Boosting morale.” Kiriona straightens her leg out—bends it again.

“That could be interesting.” Then, when Kiriona doesn’t reply: “For Emperor’s sake, Gonad, stop sulking like a kicked puppy, one petulant sister was enough. I have to get my licks in while I can, you’ll have no soft spots left by the time he’s done tweaking you.”

Kiriona gets to her feet, smooth as a servitor with all its joint sockets freshly oiled, and she doesn’t feel anything at all.

***

It’s bright on Antioch. Not as bad as the First, but their nearest star is nearer than she’s entirely comfortable with, and she pulls back from her eyes just enough that the searing landscape blurs into a smear of uniform yellow-brown.

They touch down on a bare, dusty landing field in the middle of a bare, dusty expanse of land, a good three miles outside the capital city where the abandoned Cohort barracks are. She’s surprised to find that the base looks pretty much just as Naughty Nireids III: Operation Desert Thirst led her to expect: orderly rows of tents and larger half-cylindrical temporary structures that glint in the fierce light, walls of what must be local stone topped with whorls of spiked wire, spindly guard towers with two-person huts at the top. And okay, she wasn’t actually expecting ranks of barely-clothed Sixth House reservists spouting dirty talk in rhyming couplets, but she thought there would be some people.

At last a lone soldier comes jogging across to meet them—when she’s close enough, her pips denote a rank of captain—and straightens into a crisp salute. “Your Serene Highness. Most Holy Saint of Awe.”

“A positively effusive welcome,” drawls Ianthe, glancing around pointedly at the empty landing field.

“Apologies, Sacred Hand. We’re tracking a sandstorm headed this way. If you’ll follow me, we can debrief in shelter.”

Kiriona puffs an amazed laugh. “This really is like Naughty Nireids III. There was only one bunk.” The captain, the prince, and their five-person Imperial Guard escort all turn to look at her.

Ianthe sighs deeply. “Lead the way, Captain.”

***

Meetings are like what Gideon used to imagine dying on the Ninth would be—an exercise in such drawn-out excruciation as to make the soul flee the body just to make it stop, though even then, there’s no escape. This meeting has the benefit of the Necrolord Prime’s absence, so there’s significantly less fawning; but Ianthe is here, so there’s considerably more Ianthe.

“...had reports that they’re mobilizing, but we haven’t been able to get anyone close enough to their operation to take stock of their ordnance.”

“Yes, the uniforms are rather conspicuous,” says Ianthe, with an expression like she’s waiting for polite applause. She’s leaning back in her chair, legs crossed ankle-on-knee, and her boots gleam like she actually shined them. There’s a tablet in her flesh hand, and she’s made a hideous little button of fat and skin on the tip of one gold bone finger to interact with the touch surface. She isn’t looking at the captain, her eyes half-lidded and flickering over the tablet screen, but only an idiot would think she’s not paying attention.

Kiriona’s not an idiot. She’s also not paying attention. She tries to focus in on the captain, ruddy-faced with hair the color of the landing field dust, a hardness in her expression that says she’s immune to Ianthe’s humor. Her pips are ringed in gold for the Third, and that’s interesting—maybe she’s more of a Coronabeth fan.

“...recommend delivering your address as soon as we can coordinate the broadcast with the municipal government,” the Coronabeth fan is saying. “There are multiple wings operating here with their own internal conflicts, any new developments will delay B of E action and will reassure the cooperative citizens who are waiting for resettlement to begin.”

Ianthe types something out letter by letter with calculated dispassion. All Kiriona can make out from this angle are little blocks of text, with what looks suspiciously like her name next to some of them. “Will the sandstorm affect the signal?”

“Not if we work fast enough.”

“Then you’d best get started.” Blue eyes speckled with brown, like someone’s tracked dirt in over them, rise from the tablet screen and skip past the captain to land on Kiriona. Ianthe holds the tablet out to her. “Here, sister. You can review your lines.”

“Lines?” Kiriona repeats. She really wasn’t paying attention.

Ianthe smiles with too much eye-squint to be sincere. “Our first public address as Imperial Princes.”

Kiriona balks. “I didn’t think I’d have to say anything.”

“There’s a teleprompter. You can read, can’t you?”

“Why can’t I just, you know…” She gives a little cupped-hand wave like she’s seen Dad do when he appears at a shipwide muster. “We just want them to see me, right? The crown, the uniform, the face that apparently pisses Edenites off, thanks Mum.”

Ianthe’s eyes narrow, and her smile curdles into something much more like a predatory animal. She takes the tablet back, looking it over and nodding to herself. “I suppose you’re right—I should do the talking.” Her eyes fix on Kiriona again, calculating; she reaches out, taps the middle of her forehead with the fat-tipped bone finger—

Kiriona Gaia is Sent Away.

***

awareness comes to you first as the faraway sound of an ocean. it rolls and breaks arrhythmically and sends up the odor of salt and wet stone and things that grow along the edges of persistent damp. then you start to perceive a change in the quality of the darkness; less a lightening, more of a thickening. a construction of the space, like a skeleton forming from a single chip of bone, except it’s more than a skeleton. it’s a huge-ass osseous shield that builds itself around you, builds light outside itself that filters through where it’s thinnest, exposing seams like the inside of a skull.

you remember this.

you scramble to your feet from a floor speckled with the uneven shapes of debris and slicked with blood and edged with the stark silhouettes of dead vegetation and a corroded border fence. there is not enough light for those vicious points to gleam—they are a void instead, Tomb-black.

I don’t want to be here, you tell the fence. you press your hands to porous bone, as far from the fence as you can get, and make a fist, and slam your fist against the barrier. I don’t want to be here! WHAM. bone regenerates around the crack you make. Tridentarius? there is no sound but your scrabbling, trying to find purchase in the minute gaps where plates of the dome connect. Ianthe! Fuck!

another name is lodged cancerous in your throat, spreading through your chest, and you are frozen by the certainty that if you just look down you will see her there at your feet—the bird-boned body that never once ate a full meal or slept a full night, the eyes as black as iron fence posts, the red sheen of bloodsweat on her face and in her hair and on her lips as she tries to tell you—

I DON’T WANT TO BE HERE, you insist, but you are here, we are here.

then we aren’t. the scenery writhes, deconstructs and reconstitutes itself until we’re dumped onto that shitty little cot at the end of— at the end of her bed, the cavalier cot, too narrow and too short and you’re certain if you just turn your head to the left you’ll see the shivering lump of her under the blankets—

and then the cot is bigger but worse, too thin to disguise the cold of the floor of your—my—our cell. our room, on the Ninth. you’re wrapped in our hateful church robe because it’s too cold to sleep without it, and as you roll upright and shrug it off your shoulders your hand slaps down onto the crinkled edge of a magazine half-shoved under the mattress. you curl your fingers around it; by pure muscle memory you glance at the door—locked, no sound outside it, but you think you can see the dark-on-dark shadow of feet on the threshold.

you draw out the magazine, tear your eyes from the gap under the door. Frontline Titties of the Fifth, you announce into the stillness, which has a waiting quality like a held breath. your uniform almost glows in this accustomed darkness, pristine; your crown itches in your hair, so you take it off and set it beside the pillow.

Frontline Titties isn’t a real—

No shit. But this is better than— This can be all right. For a while.

together we curl onto our side, back to the wall, our head pillowed on the scratchy frieze of the balled-up robe, and page through to the first article.

VIOLABETH TRITOS: a candid conversation with the Queen of Ida on her daughters’ eighteenth birthday

“People try to convey how difficult motherhood is before you have children, but it’s impossible to believe until you’re living it. The time and energy you pour into them, just hoping for the best…it’s even harder with two, you know—when one is crying the other starts crying—their night nanny used to wake me dreadfully early in the morning to feed them when they were infants, but of course I had asked her to, we worried a wet nurse might dilute their necromancy…”

***

Kiriona is yanked back to herself all at once, tethers pulled thrummingly taut, and she opens her eyes to chaos.

Chaos, and fucking sand—she can’t feel it stinging but she can see it, gummed onto the rims of her eyes. She gasps in a breath she doesn’t need, and sand coats her tongue and the spongy inside of her mouth, her throat, all the breathing bits her father made whole where the spike through the side of her neck had nicked them, so that she could speak. She coughs, splutters, choking, and is swiftly slapped across the face.

“Stop that,” shouts the Prince of Awe. “You don’t need to breathe. Get up, we’re under attack.”

“What the fuck did you do to me?” Kiriona hollers, and only then registers the clamor of fighting around them, screaming and gunshots and the slice of blades through bodies, and above it all—the wind.

The sandstorm. Low visibility. An ambush? There’s a persistent tugging at her arm, her overly-decorated lapel. An urgent growl. “Gideon!”

Then she’s on her feet, rapier drawn, slipping her hand into the gauntlet buckled at her waist, and she slides gratefully into the rapturous trance of the fight.

It comes to her in flashes. Enemy soldiers, their faces obscured by masks and goggles to protect them from the sand. Flashes of gunfire in the dim that tell her where to cut. Bullets thudding against her skin and falling to the ground, or pinging off in all directions. Blue-bright bursts of spirit magic farther off, the wet cacophony of bones and flesh and fat much closer, Ianthe at her shoulder, Ianthe pressed back against her back, the gleam of her in the dim as they clear each tent, each huge metal hut, until at last Ianthe wraps her flesh hand around Kiriona’s wrist and draws her sword arm down, because there’s no one left to kill.

***

Three hours and two debriefs later Kiriona turns off all the lights in her room, strips off her ruined uniform, and hauls her perforated corpse into the sonic. It thrums the sand from her hair, her eyes, her cracked lips. The crust of gritty blood that formed around her collar, and everything that snuck underneath. The particles she inhaled will just have to stay in her lungs, at least until her father notices and scours them out with his sinus-searing magic.

Then she switches it over to the shower—a luxury on a spacecraft, afforded only the Emperor Undying and his Princes—and sinks to the floor of the stall to let the spray thunder over her head and her shoulders. Here, in the familiar dark, she can actually hear herself think, and her body begins to feel…if not better, then at least hers. Her tethers are all firm; her limbs responsive as she tests them with minute shifts and flexions, a practice of fine control.

It’s an illusion, and she knows it. If even Tridentarius can knock her out of the pilot seat—

She feels a distant rage, perceptible in the way her mind grinds against itself like an arthritic joint. She needs to talk to Ianthe. Tell her to never fucking do that again. Or maybe tell her to send her Away and never bring her back. What difference would it really make, whether she’s tied or she’s floating? She’s still dead, in either case. It’s one or the other, or find a way to get to the River and just go mad like a proper ghost. A waste all around, when she should have been a meal.

Eventually she hauls herself back to her feet. Dresses herself in the dark in a fresh uniform shirt and trousers. Knots a clean scarf around her throat to tuck into her collar, and shoves her feet back into her scuffed and bloodied boots. Should’ve brought them in the sonic, but also who cares. Braces herself for the light of the hallway and thinks, with a single moment of uncomplicated longing, of her sunglasses lost along with everything else.

Soldiers scatter and scurry around her as she crosses the ship—she dimly remembers one of the briefings involving an order to send reinforcements and clean-up teams down to the surface—but she makes her way aft uninterrupted. The hall to Ianthe’s room is still warded; on closer inspection, Kiriona finds that the blood looks old, a few days at least. Unusual. When she sticks her hand in, the senescence field crackles and sparks off her skin until the blood swirls all start to steam and then burst with a series of firecracker pops, littering the floor with dull brown flakes like a very unfortunate dandruff.

“Huh,” she says into the ensuing silence. “Sloppy.”

She wrenches open the fire door, ready to march to Ianthe’s room and—well, she doesn’t know quite what yet—and is arrested by a distant sound she can’t place, rising and falling like an alarm. For a moment she’s frozen. Is there a fire? A hull breach? Did Ianthe take a nap and this hideous noise is her wake-up? More cautiously she follows the sound down the hall, louder as she approaches, and interspersed with an effortful wobbling, like a radio with a bad signal.

It’s definitely coming from Ianthe’s room; Kiriona bangs on the door. “Tridentarius! Open the fuck up!”

No response; the alarm pitches higher. She bangs again, obstinate, almost ready to override the lock until she hears Ianthe’s muffled growl and the autodoor slides open.

She’s slapped by a wall of sound, stunned into stillness; in the room, Prince Ianthe Naberius is pacing manically with her hands clapped to her ears. There’s quite a lot less frippery and lace and pastel here than Kiriona was expecting, compared to Ianthe’s room on the Mithraeum—as if in the month or more they’ve been on board, she hasn’t bothered to decorate—and there is quite a lot of…machine taking up significant floor space. The boxy functionality of it puts her in mind of the generators, back on the Ninth, but it’s topped with a strange, elongated blister of plex, roughly the size and shape of a child’s coffin, with its clear lid hanging open and the inside lined with Cohort standard-issue blankets.

And on top of the blankets, red face screwed up and mouth stretched open, is—

“What the fuck is that,” she says, dumbfounded.

Ianthe, who’s looking more like a bag of ass than usual, closes her eyes as though this question pains her more than anything in the dark span of the Nine Houses has ever pained anyone. “A vat womb.”

“You know what I mean.”

“It’s a baby, you complete imbecile. It’s very obviously a baby!”

“Well, I’ve never seen one before! Why is it making that noise?”

“I would gladly give my other arm to know,” says Ianthe, with a shocking waver in her voice, “it never stops.”

“Well, that can’t be true,” protests Kiriona, sidling up to the writhing creature. Its eyes are unhappy slits, legs curled up and arms waving in despair. It has a fluff of fine black hair on its tiny head, like the fuzzy round blossoms of snow leeks left in the field too long. “Babies sleep sometimes, right? Where in God’s hot universe did you get a baby?”

Ianthe stares at her in incredulous misery, palms still pressed to her ears, for a beat too long.

Kiriona flounders, looking from Ianthe to the baby and back. “There’s no way you…” When she gestures vaguely toward Ianthe’s stomach, the other prince’s expression crumples up in disgust.

“Emperor’s sake, Gonad, the vat womb is right there.”

“But you grew it? I mean, it’s yours?” Kiriona glances between them again. The baby is mostly blotchy scarlet from all the screaming, but the skin fades to a soft light brown around the cuticles of its impossibly small clenched fingers and toes. And the hair certainly isn’t very Third.

“Why else would it be here!” Fed up, Ianthe shoulders Kiriona out of the way and starts wrapping the baby up in the blanket, all its flailing limbs contained. When she scoops it roughly up against her shoulder, it’s shocked silent for a moment, and Kiriona catches a glimpse of night-black eyes—and when it starts up screaming again, Ianthe makes for the door. “I can’t put up with this anymore.”

Kiriona hooks her by the elbow. “Where are you going?”

“The incinerator.”

“You can’t put a baby in the incinerator!”

“Watch me.” When Kiriona steps into the doorway, stance wide enough to block it, Ianthe looks down at her with dead-eyed calm. “Move.”

“No. Just…give it to someone else. Drop it off in the ship hospital.”

“And risk muddying the lines of House succession with a hidden bastard? That only ends well in novels, and not always then.” Ianthe leans into her space; this close, the baby’s wailing feels like an actual physical force, a slow, rhythmic hammering of iron through the chest. “This was politics. Politics that didn’t pay off, and now I have a mess to clean up. Move, Gaia, and don’t make me tell you again.”

All her tethers tremble a warning like spiderwebbing; Kiriona ties herself tighter into her limbs, into the stony angles of her own expression. Her fingers curl on either side of the doorframe. “Give it to the other parent then, whoever it is. Tell me who, and I’ll bring it to them.”

This, of all things, seems to wound her; Ianthe reels back as if slapped. “Look at it, you dimwitted oaf!” She holds the baby out in two hands like a platter of food that happens to be screaming. “It’s Harrowhark’s.”

What?

“What?” she says, moronically. Something moves through her like the cold seep of water into cloth, chased by a wash of searing, prickling heat; neither is precisely physical—more like a memory of pain, a spasm through the points where she’s connected to herself, an electric zing to everything that’s her, everything her father could retrieve and strap down.

Ianthe’s eyes crimp closed, the pale lashes trembling; the bags beneath them are dark and puffed with exhaustion. “I thought she would be here.” Her voice is astonishingly small.

And there’s that terrible grinding again, like molar against molar, her own mind abrading itself with a distant rage that can find no outlet. Kiriona doesn’t need to breathe, but she does, deeply, and the sand in her lungs scrapes gratifyingly against soft inner tissues. She looks at the baby, and wishes she could see anything of Harrow in it—but it’s too wrinkled up to tell. Why would Ianthe lie? But why would she do this at all?

The baby’s squashy face somehow conveys angry! and tired! and want! with uncomplicated purity; those are things she understands. She can figure out the rest later.

Gideon takes the wriggling, screaming cocoon and tucks it against her shoulder just as Ianthe had; finds her hand curling around the back of its head, and decides that feels good. Secure.

Then she turns and walks away—and if Ianthe says a word, the baby’s too loud in her ear to hear it.

***

LT CMDR HANNAH ARBA, the tag on the door declares, outlined in Fourth blue; she registers it only deeply enough to confirm she’s knocking in the right place. Then the autodoor whisks open and the lieutenant herself is standing on the other side, rumpled and gangly in a white singlet and the red shorts people sometimes wear in the gym, hair loose in a wild puff around her baffled face. She looks desperately teenaged; Kiriona notices, distantly, that her bare legs are speckled with minute scars.

A beat passes, marked only by the mournful sobbing of the baby, muffled against Kiriona’s uniform jacket. “I don’t know what to do.”

The adept steps aside to let her by; the door slides closed behind her. “Did you steal a baby from Antioch, Your Divine Highness?”

Kiriona blinks. “What? No! Why is that your first question?”

“This is a warship in an active combat zone, sir. Everyone here is on mandatory birth control. But you were down on the surface today, I heard there was a scuffle.”

“A scuff—no, I didn’t fucking steal a baby. And this ship is full of necromancers.”

“Yes, we are famously good at procreating,” says Lieutenant Arba.

Then she reaches for the baby, and Gideon flinches away.

Arba pauses. Holds up her hands, steady. “I used to take care of my little sisters, sir. They all liked a sideways carry. I can show you.”

“Yeah. Yeah. Okay.”

Together they shift the baby from her shoulder to her arm, its belly heaving in her palm, its fuzzy head tucked in the crook of her elbow. “Babies this little have shit neck muscles, so it’s up to you to keep their head positioned so they can breathe.” Almost immediately the rhythm of its crying shifts, slowing, and the pitch lowers into something less like a siren and more like a funeral lament.

“What the fuck.”

Arba sniffs at the blanket-wrapped lump in the general area of the baby’s tail end.

“What the fuck?”

“Probably doesn’t need urgent changing. Here, try a little swing—” The lieutenant’s thin hands rock her arm back and forth, and her torso goes with it automatically. “If that doesn’t do it, try up and down, some babies like up and down.” She leans in. “Shhhhhh,” she says, like it’s gonna listen to her? “Shhhhhhh. Like that. You try.”

“Shhhhhh,” says Kiriona, doubtfully.

“Keep that up. Might be hungry…are your hands clean? Nevermind.” The adept hurries away, comes back with a dollop of antibac cupped in her palm and rubs it into Kiriona’s free hand with rough efficiency. “See if they’ll suck on your little finger ‘til I come back.”

Kiriona looks up, and only then realizes she’s been staring at the baby, mesmerized by the whorl of its miniscule ear. “Where are you going?”

“We need supplies.” She whips on a red track jacket and zips it to the chin, ties her hair back swiftly. “Stay here.”

Then she’s gone, and Gideon is alone with a crying baby.

Crying less than before, though. A fluttery, grizzly sort of crying. She tries to keep the swinging of her arm regular; feeling unbearably foolish, she sets the tip of her pinky finger against the baby’s unhappy mouth, it’s curled pink tongue, and that mouth closes fast as a trap and commences with a level of suction that seems improbable for a creature the length of her forearm with shit neck muscles.

“What the fuck,” she says into the sudden quiet of the room.

***

Prince Kiriona Gaia spends half the night learning how to mix formula and feed and burp her demanding charge (“Every couple of hours, I’m sorry to tell you”); how to change a nappy (“Probably a girl then,” Arba says, cleaning her up); how to swaddle her properly and lay her down to sleep in the bottom of the emptied post-natal care box Arba requisitioned from the hospital wing, lined with crumbly grave dirt in plex bags (“Home dirt is best but I didn’t know what you’d want, so this is from the Fourth stock”).

She spends the other half of the night staring at the baby’s sleeping face, and sometimes at her waking face—eyes dark and very gently downturned when she’s calm, eyebrows pinched and expressive of every minor displeasure. Surprisingly, she looks more like Harrow when she’s not screaming, though maybe there’s a bit of Ianthe in the shape of her nose.

For a while Gideon wonders if she’s just seeing what she wants to see—then has a good half hour of panic about wanting it—then tries to pick apart Ianthe’s motives, why would she do this, how would she do this, and what the hell is up with Lyctors and cooking up custom infants for political gain?

“Something we have in common,” she says to the baby, when those dark eyes blink open again.

The baby’s lips purse; there’s a familiar little divot in her top lip at the philtrum, neat as a bow. Then her mouth stretches into a frown that would be comical in a different situation, and she warbles out a warning cry, forehead wrinkling ragefully.

“Yeah, yeah,” says Gideon, already mixing up another bottle.

***

In the morning she brings the baby to breakfast, and the gobsmacked expression of the Emperor of the Nine Houses is possibly the best thing she’s seen in her unlife. She might actually laugh, if she wasn’t already girding herself for a fight.

But she doesn’t get a fight—her father cocks his head like he’s working out a very difficult math problem, then tucks one finger into the baby’s palm and legitimately coos when she grips it. “Oh my,” he murmurs. “I did ask Harrowhark if she and Ianthe were being safe.”

Kiriona gags. “Please don’t ever say anything like that again. And fuck that. She’s mine.”

Those horrible eyes flick up to hers, and she’s grateful for the millionth time that she doesn’t need to breathe; she’d pass out otherwise, his gaze holds her so still. “All right, Kiriona,” he says; then, hushed, to the baby: “Tiheiwa mauri ora! My first grandchild.” There are bags under his eyes too—does nobody sleep in this place?—and he blows across his mug of tea, dips his thumb into it. Wipes the tea in a furtive plus sign on the baby’s soft forehead, then dabs with his shirt cuff before it can drip into her eyes. “What’s her name?”

“Doesn’t have one. What the hell are you doing?”

“She seems healthy enough…surely she’ll have aptitude, so feed her up now as much as you can. Have you got some grave dirt for her cot?”

“Yop.”

“Good, good,” he says, thumbing some invisible bit of crust from the corner of the baby’s eye. “She won’t need it when she’s with you, you’re more than sufficiently thanergetic. Perhaps we should get you some kind of sling…”

Kiriona scowls, irritation prickling at her insides like the sand in her lungs, and makes a mental note to ask Lieutenant Arba about slings. “Stop pretending you know all about babies. I’m handling it, thanks.”

The Necromancer Divine straightens, and casually sets down his tea. The quiet that falls feels like a threat, like the hush of the empty nave before a flogging; carefully, Kiriona shifts the baby from the crook of her right arm to her left. Her father doesn’t look at her—but when he turns away to fetch their plates from the counter of his little galley kitchen, the tension perceptibly deflates again. “Sit, sit. Let’s talk about names. What do you think of Hinenuitepō?”

***

Like any new stimulus on a ship full of repressed and frequently traumatized soldiers, the baby—the Infant Princess, Holy Grandchild of the Resurrection!—quickly becomes the focus of intense interest. Admirals stare at her in meetings; soldiers pause in the halls to smile, or wave, or dangle things over her little box-cot while Kiriona lifts in the training room. The baby accepts this attention with a mixture of wonder and disdain; for Kiriona, it’s an unanticipated boon. Nobody stares awkwardly at her anymore—they still salute, but she can tell that in most people’s minds she has shrunk down to the arms that hold up the baby, the hands that swoop in when the baby starts to cry, the shoulder perpetually covered by a burp cloth over which the baby charmingly spits up. Even with the baby wrapped snug between her shoulder blades like a rucksack—Sarpedon’s contribution to her collection of unasked for parenting advice, the ass-kisser, so that she can have both hands free sometimes—every eye skims over her own blank corpse expression to see what face the baby is making. It’s a profound relief.

The only exception is Ianthe, who emerges from her hidey-hole of a room fresh-faced and well-rested and crisply uniformed, and inserts herself into the running of the ship and the war and the Empire as if she’d been there all along and not cloistered away concealing a screaming infant. Ianthe never looks at the baby at all—pretends she isn’t there, most of the time, and maintains extremely uncomfortable eye contact with Kiriona at every opportunity instead.

And honestly? Fine. Kiriona would prefer to never again think about the baby as a product of Ianthe’s unfortunate loins.

“Teacher,” says the owner of the unfortunate loins, with typical unctuous smoothness, “we’ve put together a plan to retake the barracks. Once we’re reestablished there we can finally start rooting out the Edenites from all of their little dens in the city, and begin resettlement procedure in earnest.” Ianthe leans across Kiriona’s line of vision to slide a tablet to the Emperor; he picks it up one handed, as the baby is quite powerfully clutching the first finger of his other hand while she sucks down her afternoon snack.

Kiriona ignores these invasions of her personal space, on both sides; her eventide ankle-biter is peevish about meals, and it’s been a long week of perfecting the angle and pace, the arrangement of both their limbs, the temperature of the formula and the temperature of the hot water bottle Kiriona’s been shoving down her bandeau in a paltry approximation of body heat, to get the best results.

“You’ve put your sister on the front line of this assault,” says the Meddler Undying, and that has Kiriona glancing up; she’s startled to find every eye suddenly on her.

Ianthe smiles as though savoring a particularly good dessert, gestures loosely to Kiriona. “She is unkillable, my Lord. She’s our greatest asset.”

“Well, you can eat my asset.” Kiriona scowls; shifts the angle of the bottle minutely when the baby’s feet wiggle impatience against her thigh. “I can’t go down there now.”

Tipping her face into one hand, Ianthe’s brows furrow; her eyes never leave Kiriona’s. “Whyever not? Was our little tussle in the desert too intense for you?”

Awkward tension wells up around the table like a blister, until Sarpedon clears his throat. “We’ll have to staff you a nanny, of course. I think it’s past time to have you back in the fighting force, Your Divine Highness. You said yourself only a week ago, you’re excellent for morale.”

A nanny? Kiriona hasn’t let the baby out of her sight since the night she claimed her; hasn’t let anyone but Lieutenant Arba so much as hold her. “No.”

“Surely at least a month of parental leave would be more humane,” the Emperor murmurs, and she hates the way he looks at the baby, thoughtfully, stroking the tiny bumps of her knuckles with his thumb.

Sarpedon’s avuncular smile stiffens. “This is a combat zone, my Lord. We try to avoid this situation entirely. But when it occurs, a week is standard for a non-gestational parent, I’m afraid.”

“I said no. I’m not leaving her with anyone.”

“Now, Kiriona,” says the Emperor, transitioning seamlessly in his Stern Dad aspect, “eventually you’ll have to. Your sister has a point. Your…particular skills are too important to waste indefinitely, and Ihimaera can’t always go everywhere with you.”

“That’s not her name,” says Kiriona. Then, before she has a chance to think it through: “Make her like me, then. Make her unkillable. I’ll take her along in the sling.”

Her father looks, for a moment, genuinely shocked; then a horrible pity seeps into his face. “Oh, my child. I can’t do that.” He touches her elbow, almost tender. “You are my finest work. The final expression of the art of the Nine Houses. You are my construct.” Then he looks down, at the baby’s dark head. “And she is still alive.”

The baby’s brows wrinkle; she turns her face away from the bottle with a fretful sound. Kiriona’s gripping her too tight, she’s mucked up their equilibrium and put the baby off her feed.

She stands abruptly, hooks the nappy bag over her shoulder, and walks out of the meeting.

***

When Lieutenant Arba answers the door this time, she’s in the same stretched-out singlet and red gym shorts looking blearier than usual, and the lights in her quarters are off. Kiriona brushes past her into the comforting dark, and sits down abruptly on the uncomfortable loveseat all the officers get.

“Come on in, Your Highness,” Arba sighs.

The baby grizzles, uncomfortable; on autopilot, Kiriona tips her up against one shoulder to softly pat her back.

“Sir? Is something wrong?”

She suddenly wants, so badly, to be Away. To cut all her tethers, to see and hear and feel nothing, empty as ancient and used-up bone.

But if she goes, she’ll drop the baby. The little grub yells in her ear before delicately burping; she settles, and in the dark room, maybe she’ll fall asleep.

Something touches her knee. It’s Arba’s hand. “Sir?”

The lieutenant has crusties clinging at the corners of her eyes, and her hair is wrapped up messily in a scarf. She looks weary, somehow, like everyone else on this fucking ship. Kiriona tries to focus on these things, and understand what they mean. “Were you sleeping?”

“Yes.”

“It’s the middle of the afternoon.”

“I’m on the night shift.”

“Since when?”

“All right, I’m not. I was sleeping in the middle of the afternoon. It’s my day off.” Arba rocks back from a squat to sitting on the floor in front of the lumpy loveseat. “Did something happen?”

“They want to send me planetside again.”

The lieutenant slings her arms around her knees and tips her head, considering this. “Tactically speaking, I can understand why.”

“Fuck tactics!” Too loud—the bantam tsarina on her shoulder shrieks in concert, possibly just for fun. “Shhhhhh,” she tries with little hope, rocking gently forward and back. “Sarpedon wants to assign some rando to take care of her while I go swing my sword around.”

“You like swinging your sword around, sir.”

“Not the point.”

“Well,” says Arba with a sigh, “I could do it. If you want.”

Kiriona blinks at her. “Just like that?”

“I’d have to go through channels, but sure. I’m not…actually doing anything else. I’m technically on extended leave.”

“For what?” Kiriona tries to focus in a little harder; she can feel her own face frowning idiotically, and Arba meets this expression with a calm bordering on blankness.

“Bereavement. My cav. That’s why I go to so many practice duels. I’m supposed to be looking for a new one.”

Something goes spang in Gideon’s chest, like a misplaced ligament snapping back. It’s not quite pain. It’s not not pain. “I’m sorry. That’s fucked.”

“That’s Fourth.” Arba tips her chin at the baby. “I’d rather look after her. I miss my little sisters, you know?”

A glance at the baby’s face confirms she’s conked out; careful not to jostle, Gideon holds her out like an offering. “Your sisters still alive?”

Arba uncurls to take her. Tucks her close, practiced, against her bird-boned chest. “Four of them, yeah. What was it like being an only child?”

For a long minute Gideon considers her childhood, in bearable fragments of memory like a slideshow; dark holes and gripping hands, the gleam of her sword, the taste of blood in her mouth. And Harrow, in the periphery, a deeper shadow against the gloom. The clinking of bones and the smell of rotting old books. Beetle-black eyes, watching her, always.

“I think it kind of sucked. But. I dunno. Sometimes it feels like that was someone else’s life.”

The eyes watching her now are Arba’s, muddy brown in the dim room. “You can sleep, if you want.”

“I don’t sleep.”

“Rest your eyes, then. Whatever you used to do at night before you acquired a baby.”

“It’s still the middle of the afternoon,” Kiriona protests, though all her limbs feel heavy as stone.

“Sir.”

“All right, fine, just, I might look…weird.”

“Weird?”

Kiriona shrugs. “Creepy. Dead.”

“Then I’ll throw a blanket over your face.” Carefully she gets to her feet; kicks lightly at Kiriona’s boot. “Take the bed. But take these off, I don’t want boot crud in my sheets.”

Chapter Text

Meetings in the city barracks proper, now that they’ve been retaken and cleared, are just as boring as meetings on the Seat of the Emperor—with the added disadvantage that Kiriona’s often attending them in a uniform stiff with blood and pocked with bullet holes. She asked for civvies when they started clearing out Blood of Eden weapons caches and facilities disguised as boring office buildings, arguing that the intelligence agents get to wear them, and it’s idiotic to walk around a shepherd planet with an open resistance movement in gleaming white leather. This argument was shot down by Ianthe Naberius, the only person on Antioch with the rank to argue with her, on the basis that her hair and her eyes and her rapier would give her away regardless. She suspects Ianthe also just enjoys dressing up like a dick.

“It’s about intimidation, Gonad. You’re an Imperial Prince. Remember whose daughter you are and straighten your crown.”

So she keeps slashing and burning enemy strongholds, and adding medals and pips to her already overburdened jacket every time her brave entrance into the fray shields the soldiers behind her from Edenite guns, and once a week she brings a full bag to the make-and-mend laundry on the ship and picks up whatever could be cleaned, patched, or straight up replaced by the tailors from the week before.

“Excuse me, Your Serene Highness, Most Holy Saint?”

Ianthe’s mouth flattens at the intrusion, and the commander at the white board pauses with his marker poised over their next target. “Yes?”

“I’m sorry for the interruption, but the admirals are recalling you to the ship immediately. The shuttle’s waiting.”

The Saint of Awe straightens. “What happened?”

“I don’t know, Holy Gesture.”

“Hmh. Commander, double the barracks guard until we return.”

“Yes, sir.”

And together the Imperial Princes, Ianthe suspiciously less bloodsplattered than Kiriona, sweep out of the room.

“You love this shit, don’t you?” Kiriona muses as they’re hustled into the shuttle and belted into their seats. “Having minions. Ordering them around.”

Ianthe smiles, indulgently. “I really do. And you love your little heroics.” She gestures to Kiriona’s jacket. One of the sleeves is missing; the shirt beneath is shredded and blackened, showing bare swathes of bloodless brown arm. “What was this, a grenade?”

“Alcohol bomb, but it didn’t fully catch.”

“So that’s why you smell like Daddy’s liquor cabinet. They’re getting desperate.” Casually, Ianthe picks a fleck of dust from her pristine gloves. “It’s entertaining, how your face riles them up.”

“Yeah, well. Apparently I look like her. Commander Wake.”

“Oh, you do.” Kiriona twists to stare at her, to which Ianthe just raises a pale eyebrow. “You must have seen that bloody photograph. It’s on the wall in every site we hit.”

“I haven’t been studying the decor.”

Infuriatingly, Ianthe smiles again and pats her thigh. “I’ll steal one for you next time.”

The warrant officer who fetched them from Antioch’s surface leads them to the most secure of the ship’s many meeting rooms—it probably has a name, but Kiriona has so far avoided learning it—and when they enter, the admirals all stand. The Emperor, slumped at the head of the table with his face in his hands, doesn’t move at all.

“Your Highness, Holy Saint.” The admiral from the Second has a stony, clipped way of speaking, straight-backed with her hands folded together behind her. What was her name again? Hemi? “We’ve received unfortunate news from the Dominicus System. The Sixth House installation is gone.”

It takes a long beat for Kiriona to understand the words. “What do you mean, gone?”

“We’re not sure precisely what happened,” hedges the admiral, eyes flickering to the Necromancer Divine, who has not yet so much as flinched or made a sound. “Intelligence from the Seventh suggests the Library is simply…not there anymore.”

Ianthe sighs out a breath through her nose. “Destroyed, when Dominicus…hiccuped?”

“That seems most likely.”

“But that was months ago,” Kiriona protests. “Nobody noticed a whole House melted until today?”

Admiral Sarpedon, who has to this point been watching the Emperor with unseemly attention, drags his eyes away to regard Kiriona with patronizing sympathy. “Electromagnetic radiation from the flare fried communications all the way to the Seventh, and made it impossible to get shuttles close to either House. The radiation field has now retracted enough to get reports and visual from the observatory at Rhodes, but it’s still too dense around the Sixth to send reconnaissance.”

The admiral from the Fifth—Hamza?—clears her throat. “We’ll make a shipwide announcement shortly, and any Sixth crew aboard will be relieved of duty, duration indeterminate. This will come as quite a shock, especially so soon after the Master Warden…well. It will be a difficult time.”

Memory splashes up the insides of Kiriona’s skull, like water lapping at the walls of her well inside Harrowhark’s mind. A green, humid planet—a gray shadow—Camilla Hect, impossibly alive and impossibly far from home—Palamedes Sextus, a ghost in a bubble, the stinging touch of his necromancy brushing Harrow’s, brushing Gideon, hidden away, and the sudden smile that always transformed his face into something shockingly beautiful.

That face is gone. But there’s something—she can’t quite pin it down, but—if Cam is still alive, somewhere, then there’s surely something left of the Warden too.

She becomes aware, all at once, of an emptiness, yawning open in her like a wound, a maze of wounds suspiciously the shape of Canaan House—and older still, a cavern, a deep shaft of want carved through her, a singularity. She knows this emptiness, familiar as the foggy memory of a dream; but she took her eyes off it, and it’s grown. She breathes. Fills her lungs with unnecessary air, because for a frozen moment, there’s nothing else she can do.

Then she’s snapped from this existential crisis by a sound she can’t identify, and finds herself standing numbly in the nearly-empty room with Ianthe, who’s pulled a chair up at the Emperor’s side; Sarpedon, with a hand on the Emperor’s shoulder; and the Emperor, who is tiredly, wretchedly sobbing.

Gideon nopes the fuck out of that one, and beelines for her quarters at a jog.

Somewhere around midship, the internal and external messes she’s fleeing mutate into a tighter, more easily labeled bubble of panic, until she bursts through her door and finds the baby on her back in her box cot, with her bumpers of grave dirt, waving some kind of doll in the air above her with shrieking enthusiasm. The doll seems to have more flopping limbs than it should, and also is embroidered with what looks suspiciously like Cohort braid.

Arba, accustomed by now to Kiriona’s messy entrances post-battle, barely glances up. “Cute, isn’t it? Vav made it for her out of your uniform scraps. Said it’s called a ‘bunny.’”

“Who’s Vav?”

“The petty officer who runs the make and mend. They dropped off some new jackets for you.”

“Vav’s a Sixth name.”

“Yeah. Why do you smell like a bad bar fight?”

Kiriona fills up her lungs again, slow; the baby continues to happily shriek, shaking the bunny like she’s looking forward to eviscerating it, and then hits herself in the face with it trying to get it to her mouth. “How would you know what a bar fight smells like, you’re not old enough to drink.”

“Officer’s prerogative, sir.”

“Sure. I’m getting in the sonic.” Another breath, in and out, and it doesn’t do anything for her, except that it does. “There’s gonna be an announcement.”

Arba looks up, her eyes sharp. “That’s never good news.”

Kiriona shakes her head, minutely. “Stay, until then? We can…I don’t know. Talk, or whatever.”

“You could have a future as a ship’s counselor, sir.”

“Smartass.”

“Go change,” Arba tells her; but her eyes slide to the intercom by the door, forebodingly silent.

***

Later, Kiriona takes the baby, the baby’s bunny, the baby’s nappy bag, and a just-in-case bottle of formula down to the laundry. If Petty Officer Vav is from the Sixth then they’ll be off-duty now, but the evening shift tailor will know where their quarters are. And Kiriona will stop by, and…what, thank them for the baby toy? When they just found out their whole House got disintegrated?

She turns around, and starts walking back to her room. Turns again, back toward the stairs. Stands frozen with uncertainty in the thankfully empty hallway, until the tyrannical fetus in her arms scowls hard and throws her bunny to the floor. Kiriona bends to retrieve it; she gives it back, walks a few steps as one of the bunny’s floppy white ears gets thoroughly mouthed, and then the baby throws it to the floor again.

“Is this your fun new game now?” The baby gurgles when she bends again, catches the other ear in her toothless maw.

They almost make it to the stairs before she throws it this time.

“Yeah, okay. I see how it is. Your mum liked making me work too.”

By the time they reach the lower decks, Kiriona is seriously considering leaving the bunny at the laundry to be washed, or perhaps to disappear permanently. Oh no, so sad, it fell apart in the sonic deep-cleaner, she’ll tell the baby, and the baby will look at her with those eyebrows, the ones that promise a slow and torturous death.

Except the autodoor to the make and mend has sign hung on it that reads “back at 20:30.”

Kiriona stands there staring at it like an idiot. “Great. This was a great plan.”

The baby yawns, uncaring—until they’re both startled by a crash from inside, the sudden cacophony of things toppling over and other things skittering in every direction across metal flooring, and a choked-off “God—!”

Kiriona slams her hand onto the wall panel and the autodoor whisks open. “Hey, everything oka—augh, Dad, what the fuck!”

“Emperor’s hairy nutsack—”

Clapping a hand to her eyes sadly does not magically unsee her father kneeling between the thighs of Petty Officer Vav, propped back on their hands on a hastily cleared sewing desk—nor does it block out the horrifying slurp and scuffle of clothes and continued muttered blasphemies that ensue when she whirls away.

“Kiriona,” says the Emperor Undying in a tone thick with drink and surprise. “What are you doing here?”

“What are you doing here?!”

“I should think that was evident,” he says, hangdog. Kiriona cranes around, daring a look. Her father is, thank fuck, sprawled fully dressed on the floor amid a chaotic mess of spilled copper buttons; Vav, redfaced and bare chested, is fumbling to cover themself with a half-embroidered jacket that’s several sizes too small. Their cropped hair is mussed; their eyes, cast determinedly down at the floor, are red-rimmed.

“Well,” says Kiriona, floundering, “I just came to…check in. And say thanks, for the baby toy.”

Vav, eyes still averted, swallows and flushes to the tips of their ears. “That’s very kind, Your Divine Highness.”

Her father, swaying to his feet, lights up with sudden interest; he leans in closer than Kiriona would like as the baby continues gamely to gum at the bunny’s head. “Oh,” he breathes, and she pulls back a little from her nose so she won’t have to smell it. “You see? Even in the face of so much death, life continues. Life continues, Kiriona. You know, when I was very small, I had a teddy. His name was Rusty Nail. My nana’s dog chewed his nose off.”

“Wow, amazing.” She shifts the baby more solidly into one arm, and then takes the Emperor by his elbow. “Come on, let’s go back to your quarters, yeah? Make some tea.”

“But I don’t have any of the good bikkies left,” he says, downtrodden, as she steers him toward the door.

“And yet life continues.”

When she glances back at Vav, they’re bent double on the table, face hidden in their hands.

***

She dumps her father in a chair in his sitting room, reluctantly brings him a cuppa and one of the second-best biscuits. He slumps over it morosely. “I told her, the first time she showed me the plans.”

“Who,” Kiriona sighs, settling opposite him and fishing that just-in-case bottle from her bag. The baby’s already chewing on her fist—no way she’ll last through a drunken reminiscence.

“Cassiopeia,” her father says, mournful. “I told her, ‘A library, that close to Dominicus? Isn’t that a bit Alexandrian?’ and then I had to explain about the Library of Alexandria, and she said she’d read about it in some of the pre-Resurrection documents she’d collected, and that it was a misconception that the Library had burned in a cataclysm, it actually declined gradually over centuries due to lack of funding. She said being close to Dominicus would make upkeep and environmental controls forever a top priority.”

He lifts the biscuit to his mouth, but he let it sit in the tea too long; half of it sloughs off and plops back into the cup. Defeated, he chews forlornly on the un-dunked half.

“‘And we have nothing to fear from Dominicus,’ she said, ‘as long as we have you, my Lord.’ She was a clever one, my Cassiopeia.”

Kiriona adjusts the angle of the baby’s bottle. “I thought she was the one that got mauled by ghosts.”

“She understood the River better than anyone,” her father replies, wetly. “And a head for finding loopholes. She chose her death. She tried to make it count.”

“Doesn’t work out, in my experience,” says Gideon, eyes fixed on the baby in her arm.

She can still feel him looking at her.

“You’ll stay with me, won’t you, Kiriona?” he says, and his voice is the quiet warning buzz of a locked security cuff. “You’ll never leave me. I have you, and you’re mine.”

The baby, fussy and overtired, turns her head away from the bottle after drinking less than half. “Sure,” says Kiriona, with careful neutrality. “Where would I go?”

***

Under the fierce daytime light of Antioch, Ianthe’s gold-shod finger bones curl with liver-curdling familiarity around the back of Kiriona’s neck. The soldiers around and behind them wait in perfect stillness for a signal from the Imperial Princes; down the stairs at the mouth of the alley where they’re hidden, another reported Edenite hiding place waits to be massacred. Her sister prince leans close. “Don’t kill them all this time,” she murmurs. “I want the commander for interrogation.”

“How do I know which one is the commander?”

One finger flicks her earlobe. “I am perpetually cursed with the thickest sisters imaginable. Just look for the one giving the commands.”

Abruptly she drops back, flashes the go signal in Cohort sign—and Kiriona charges out of the alley and down into chaos.

It’s different when she has to pay attention. Has to actually listen past the screaming, and mark a target. It’s so much easier when she can sweep through faceless ranks of bodies shooting at her without picking out individuals. But once she’s looking, the commander is easy to spot.

Kiriona bears down on them with her face fixed into a snarl and her mind a half-step removed; a handful of bullets ricochet off her chest and, when she snaps their wrist getting the gun off them, a thick serrated knife skitters along her side so hard it sparks. They’re unbalanced when their strike can’t penetrate—a sharp blow to the back of the head has them on the floor, her boot at the back of their neck, freeing her up for the furious underlings who come at her in waves—and it’s red again, all red, until there’s nobody left to fight.

When it’s over Ianthe presses her aside with a hand to her chest—right over the wound, unerringly—and wraps the Edenite commander up in a cocoon of globby yellow adipose. As Kiriona sheathes her rapier, hooks the knuckles back to her belt, Ianthe reaches up and tips a frame off the dark wood-paneled wall. “Here,” she says. “Didn’t I tell you?”

It’s a photograph. A woman, strong-jawed, ferocious. Hair like fire tumbles riotous around her shoulders, and her eyes are a piercing deep brown. Gideon tries to recognize the shape of her mother’s skull under this flesh and skin; the broad zygomatic bones, the curve of the maxillae.

All she can find is a distorted mirror of her own face.

***

It shouldn’t be a surprise that the barracks on Antioch have an interrogation room, and yet Kiriona is surprised to find herself in it, walled off behind tinted, one-way glass with a stonefaced intelligence agent, watching Ianthe work. For a good five minutes this unfortunately involves Ianthe holding the unconscious soldier’s mouth open while she prods around in there with her bone hand. Without his gas mask and hood, the commander’s face is improbably young and freckled like a starscape; he’s grown a mottled mousy-brown beard interrupted with a scar that twists the lower lip and curves along the jaw, but the hair on his head is a thick mop of lighter, more colorless brown. At last Ianthe seems to find what she’s looking for in his mouth, which she pockets—necromancers are such unrelenting freaks—and shifts to feeling around the commander’s head like she’s trying to map the shape of his skull.

“All right,” she says, muted through the speakers that pipe sound into the observation room. She straightens, standing close; the slick wrapper of fat that’s securing the soldier to the chair writhes, perhaps tightening. “Let’s try that, for starters.”

As Kiriona watches, the soldier’s breathing stutters, then forcefully settles; his eyes slide open, taking in the room, the exit, the restraints, the Imperial Prince towering over him. From this distance his eyes look light and warm-colored, like weak tea.

“Good afternoon, Commander,” says Ianthe pleasantly. “I am Prince Ianthe Naberius the First, Sacred Hand of the Emperor Divine.”

The soldier’s eyes tighten, jaw subtly working, but he doesn’t speak.

Ianthe smiles, indulgent. “Oh, are you looking for this?” From her pocket she draws a reddish capsule, no bigger than a distal phalange, holds it casually between two fingers like a cigarette. “Sorry. I’m afraid we’re stuck with each other for the foreseeable future.”

It’s three even breaths before the soldier speaks, head craned back to meet Ianthe’s eyes. “I’d hate to keep you from your genocide.”

“How considerate! Yet you haven’t given me your name. A bit disrespectful, that.”

No reply.

Ianthe tips her head, considering. “Perhaps a little…” she reaches out, and the soldier flinches—but all she does is tap his temple, and then tap again just above his ear. “Now. I would very much like to know your name.”

A shiver; the soldier’s eyelids flutter. “Radiant,” he says, after some kind of internal struggle. His head wobbles, just a little, as if tired.

“Oh, well done,” Ianthe coos. “Commander Radiant. It is Commander, isn’t it?”

“Mmm.”

“Commander Radiant…” Ianthe prompts, and the soldier’s head dips again.

“Commander Radiant Lyre Speak Veritatem Dilexi I Don’t Think You’re Ready For This Jelly, Mehrgarh Wing, Eridu Cell,” he recites, reflexive, then blinks, trying to fix his eyes on the Prince again.

“Very charming. A name with a long history, I’m sure. And where is Eridu Cell quartered?”

“Commander Radiant Lyre Speak Veritatem Dilexi I Don’t Think You’re Ready For This Jelly, Mehrgarh Wing, Eridu Cell.” It’s clear he’s struggling; his eyes flick to the one-way glass.

“All right,” murmurs Ianthe. “I do admire your resilience.” Then she lays her whole flesh palm against the side of his head, fingers curled into his hair.

It would seem intimate, if the whole thing wasn’t making Kiriona feel distantly sick to begin with. “I’m going back to the ship,” she tells the agent, who nods without looking up from her notes.

***

She doesn’t go back to the ship. Instead, with the bare minimum of charm and the evidence of her freshly bloodied uniform, she requisitions civvies. Local clothes, soft with wear, made of some kind of plant fiber; scuffed shoes of animal leather. A knit cap with a brim she can pull low and a wallet of local currency that she pockets when none of the requisitions officers are looking.

“Wish me luck,” she says to the guard at the barracks gate, and winks; flustered, the guard opens the sally port with a sharp salute.

“Good luck on your…assignment? Your Serene Highness?”

And then she’s out, camouflaged in nondescript browns and blues, stepping into a foreign city with no agenda, free for the first time in her entire life. Her entire life and death. Kiriona Gaia tugs her cap lower over her eyes, shoves her hands in her pockets, and walks.

She discovers that cities—or this one, at least—are shockingly haphazard. Some streets buzz with human and vehicle traffic, chatter and smoke and the greasy filth of industry in the absence of enough infrastructure to clean it. Some streets are tensely quiet, watchful, and she steers clear of those. Instead, she fumbles out what’s probably too much of the baffling multi-colored paper money at a food stall in exchange for sealed bottles of fizzing drinks and golden-brown pastry pockets stuffed with meat from an animal that doesn’t seem to have a name in House. From another stall she buys three bright comic books in a language she can’t read; then from a table on the sidewalk she buys a multicolored set of the most delicate handkerchiefs she’s ever seen, and a rucksack to carry it all in, and slings it onto her back.

And then, in a dim shop window obscured by grimy metal scaffolding, she sees it.

A bell announces her when she tries the door; a hunched and wrinkled old woman wrapped in a bright green scarf glances up from behind the counter, and calls some kind of greeting. Kiriona nods, glancing around at the clutter; teeming shelves, items she can barely identify hanging on hooks in every bare space of wall, tables and baskets and bins delineating claustrophobic aisles. When she finds what she’s looking for in the chaos, she makes her way gingerly to the display—doll-like simulacrums of babies, bizarrely faceless, dressed in tiny hooded coveralls in soft pastels. Animals, she realizes—the hoods have the ears, or fur, or eyes, of creatures she can’t identify—and there, off to one side, the one that caught her eye. It’s a soothing gray-blue, softly cuffed at the wrists and ankles and closed with snaps up the front. The hood has a dark blue eye stitched on either side; the opening forms a mouth studded with triangular fabric teeth, white as a fresh uniform.

“Badass,” she breathes, reaching out to touch it; the sleeve is luxuriously plush between her fingers.

“Purana kitna?” says the tiny old woman, appearing at her elbow.

“Shit! Uh, sorry. Am I not supposed to…?” Kiriona shoves her hands back in her pockets, embarrassed, until the woman pats a folded pile of pale blue.

“How old baby?” she tries, in liltingly accented House.

“Oh!” Kiriona glances at the pile, and back at the woman. “She’s…two months.” Flustered, she holds her hands out. “Scrawny.”

The woman pats her hand, then rifles through the pile and pulls one out. “Will grow! Will grow. Here. Four month. Wear longer.”

“Okay. Yeah. She’ll grow.”

***

Wallet empty and rucksack full, Kiriona slowly makes her way back in the direction of the barracks. At least, the direction she thinks the barracks is; she can’t see it yet, but when you grow up in the dark of the Ninth, you develop a strong sense of direction or you die of starvation in the catacombs.

The bustle eases off the closer she gets; by the time she hits a street she recognizes, the neighborhood around her is still and empty-feeling, tumbledown with damage from the fight to retake their base, and the fight that pushed the Cohort into the desert before that. The light of the nearest star is low and red-orange, casting deep dusky shadows, and Kiriona begins to wonder how long she’s been gone. If she can get a shuttle back up to the ship without her sister prince noticing she disappeared, maybe she can keep the civilian clothes.

Cutting through an alley, she’s brought up short by a figure outlined against the sun at the other end.

Kiriona knows it’s hot on Antioch, though in her corpse body, she can’t quite feel it; now, abruptly, she feels cold. All her tethers shudder like net trap about to spring, and something icy slithers in a line down her core, from her throat to her chest to her stomach. The figure turns toward her and starts to move, ponderous, slow. There’s something off about the motion. Rippling; unnatural. Unalive.

She sucks in a breath she doesn’t need, and it fogs in the air when she blows it out.

“Hey. You okay?” she tries, curling her hands into fists to ease the sudden urgent longing for a sword hilt in her palm.

It darts, sudden and swift—she yelps, completely fucking undignified, and throws a wild punch. The impact lands against its head with more give than it should, like punching a bag of moldy leeks, and worse, something slithers wetly along the back of her hand as she connects. The figure topples sideways; she dropkicks it sharply for good measure, and sends it crashing into the alley wall.

She waits, breathing panic-fast; the figure, slumped, doesn’t move again. Above them, an electric light on the wall buzzes and pops on, illuminating the alley with a yellow glow.

The body is definitely dead. There’s old blood all over its clothes from a hunk of shrapnel—bone, she suspects—skewering its chest just below the right shoulder, through the body armor it’s wearing. BoE, or more likely, an unaffiliated rebel BoE kitted out and then set on the front line against the Cohort. But the face—

The eyes are just holes—raw wounds circled by pinpricks in the skin—and from each empty socket dangles a limp pink tongue.

What. The fuck.

***

“Where in the River have you been?” snaps Ianthe Naberius as soon as Kiriona hustles onto the shuttle landing. “The admirals are waiting for my report, I extracted crucial intelli—”

“Do you remember Colum Asht?”

Ianthe blinks; her mouth twists. “Unfortunately, yes. Why? And what are you wearing on your head?”

“Something got in him. His eyes, they turned into, like, fucked-up mouths with tentacle tongues.”

“I was a little bit preoccupied at the time,” Ianthe drawls. “Are you sure this isn’t the plot of a particularly niche erotic novel?”

This idea is momentarily so diverting that Kiriona whips the cap off her head as if it will help the functioning of her overheated brain. “Do you have any like that?”

“I might.”

“Okay, we’re gonna come back to that. But this was real, I saw it. That.” She crumples the hat in her hand, trying to reel her thoughts back in, as Ianthe stares at her with cool impatience. “I mean, not the Eighth, someone else, a rando in an alley, with the fucking mouth-eyes.”

“That seems…somewhat unlikely.”

Kiriona scowls, turns back toward the barracks gate. “Come on, I’ll show you—”

“No,” says Ianthe sharply, hooking her elbow tight enough to bruise. “Colum Asht was possessed. You’re a walking corpse; that’s an engraved invitation worthy of the Fifth.”

“Then send someone to pick up the body. Or just, you know, believe what I’m telling you.” At this Ianthe’s face wrinkles, disdainful of either option.

But with the swift efficiency of someone who is accustomed to being obeyed, she orders a retrieval team and details a quarantine procedure and assigns a spirit magician to investigate in rapid-fire commands involving quite a lot of pointing, and then hustles Kiriona onto the shuttle.

“My weapons—”

“Already loaded, I can’t believe you went out unarmed—”

“Hey, I’ve always got these guns.”

“—and dressed like that. Every time you do something idiotic I feel a renewed bond with Harrowhark.”

“Suck my dick. And why aren’t we waiting for the body?”

“We can’t risk bringing it to the ship until we know what’s happening. We’ll both report, and see what Daddy has to say about it.”

Kiriona buckles herself furiously into a seat. “I hate it when you call him that.”

“Oh, Gonad.” Ianthe’s puckered mouth loosens into a despicable smile. “I know.”

They pass the shuttle ride in smug (Ianthe) and aggravated (Kiriona) silence; on the Seat of the Emperor, they are escorted directly to the secure briefing room, which Prince Ianthe Naberius enters as though she owns it—as per usual.

“The Sixth House wasn’t destroyed,” she announces, which—not usual. Every eye, including the Emperor’s horror show irises, fixes on her. “According to Blood of Eden intelligence, the entire Library facility has relocated.”

“That’s not possible,” says Admiral Sarpedon immediately.

Then Admiral Dreifach, placating: “Holy Saint, even if it were possible, how would the Edenites have known before we did?”

With one of her more murderous smiles for Dreifach, Ianthe continues. “They know because they’ve captured the Sixth House Oversight Body.” She sets a notebook of flimsy on the table, taps it with her fingertips. “I got as much detail as possible from the prisoner, but we’ll need to interrogate someone higher up the chain for locations. Intelligence notes will confirm. The Sixth survives, my Lord.”

The Necromancer Divine, who looks like he hasn’t shaved or had a drink of a non-alcoholic liquid in days, slumps in his chair like a sack of laundry. “Oh,” he says, eyes glistening wet like pots of ink. “Oh my me. A failsafe. Clever girl. So little faith in me, but clever.” Then his gaze swivels; struggles to sharpen. “And Kiriona. What adventure were you having in street clothes?”

“I, uh. I punched a corpse with tongues in its eye sockets.”

Her father’s expression does sharpen, then. She tries to breathe through that piercing look, and finds she can’t quite get her lungs to expand.

“That sounds a bit far fetched,” Admiral Hamza is saying, and shockingly, Ianthe backs her up.

“Her description matches a similar phenomenon that occurred at Canaan House, to the cavalier primary of the Eighth.” Under his breath, Sarpedon mutters a prayer. “I’ve ordered the body retrieved and quarantined at the barracks for further investigation.”

The Lord of the Nine Houses is still watching Kiriona. He keeps swallowing, mouth working like he’s wishing for another drink; then his eyes slide closed, releasing her from their hold. He stands, shabbily dignified in the way he’s always shabbily dignified, except when he’s just shabby. “Excuse me. I’ll be in my rooms; please update me as new information arises.”

He shuffles out amid a sycophantic chorus of “Yes, my Lord,” and Kiriona watches him go.

***

When she slips into her room, Arba is stretched out on the ugly couch with the baby asleep on her chest, a battered flimsyback novel in one hand. It’s unquestionably cute, and does nothing to smother the guilt that’s been niggling at her since she left early this morning for the raid.

“Somebody came by with your pointy things,” Arba murmurs, gesturing to a little pile by the door of her belt and sheath and knuckles and soiled uniform. “What were you up to?”

Kiriona searches for the right words, and finds herself too tired. “Just…stuff.”

Closing her book, Arba looks away. “You can just say I don’t have the clearance, sir.”

“No, I mean…okay, yeah, but also I just went shopping. I brought you some food and stuff from the city. To say thanks.” She sets her new rucksack down on the table, starts pulling out her offerings.

Behind her, Arba clears her throat. “Sorry. That’s sweet of you.”

“Also, I got this.” She holds up the soft baby suit, and Arba’s face lights.

“Oh, King over the River, that’s cute! Are those teeth?”

“Yeah, it’s some kind of giant fish.”

“We gotta put her in it.”

Kiriona sets it out next to the meat pastries and fizzy drinks. “When she wakes up. Why doesn’t she ever sleep like that with me?”

It’s a rhetorical question—or at least, she thought it was, until Arba’s face flashes with something, and her eyes go back to the baby’s head. “Dunno.”

Watching her, Kiriona sinks onto her bed to kick off her shoes. “I think you do. Tell me.”

Arba strokes the fine dark hair with one finger, chewing at her lip. “It’s the heartbeat,” she says at last. “Babies find it soothing. Womblike, you know?”

It’s very difficult to resist the urge to touch her own empty chest; she wraps her hands around her knees instead. “Vat wombs don’t have a heartbeat.”

“They have circulation pumps. Same idea.”

“Huh.”

Quiet stretches, brittle, until the lieutenant speaks again in a rush. “Thanergy, too. You’re bursting with it. It’s energizing, for her. Feels good.” Kiriona raises an eyebrow, and in the dim room Arba flushes. “Like…like warm coffee. Gives you what you need.”

“I can’t drink coffee.”

“Sir, I—”

“No, I just—it’s okay. You wanna put her in the cot? I need to check in with my dad, and he likes when I bring her.”

“Yeah. Sure. She’ll probably want a bottle soon.”

“Okay.”

***

By the time Kiriona Gaia has buttoned up a fresh uniform and buckled on her weapons and pre-warmed herself with the hot water bottle down her shirt, her vociferous dictator is awake and lodging complaints about the food service, the state of her nappy, and existence in general.

“It’s been a weird day,” Kiriona agrees. “Weirder than most, which is saying something, given that I wipe your butt kind of a lot.”

Enraged by this indignity, and probably also cold—her skinny little arms are mottling—the baby screws up her face tighter and howls.

“How about your new outfit, hmm? It’s nice and warm. I think you’ll like that. Chicks dig getting wrapped up in a big warm jumper, or that’s what the comics have led me to believe.”

The baby seems to tolerate it, as much as she tolerates anything that gets between her and a feed, as Kiriona rolls up the too-long cuffs at her wrists and her ankles. “That old lady really didn’t understand how puny you are.”

At last they settle together into the corner of the couch with a bottle, which the baby refuses with spiteful wailing until the squashy rubber nipple tickles her nose and the top of her lip and she latches on like the universe depends on it. “So much fuss,” Gideon tells her, shifting her more upright. “You don’t get that from me. I never turned down a meal in my life, even when it was poisoned. That’s how I got so big and strong and irresistible to the ladies. I’ll teach you. No kid of mine is gonna have evil stick limbs and get winded walking across a medium-sized room.

“Or, you know, if that’s how it is then that’s how it is. If Camilla Hect couldn’t put even one single muscle on her adept then I don’t know what chance I’ll have. And I won’t tell you who to be. Maybe you’ll love bones. I can’t teach you a lot but I could maybe do an introduction. Bones for Babies with Dr. Skeleona Bona. I do hope you’re not into Ianthe’s weird flesh magic stuff, because that’s nasty.

“Either way though, I’ll look out for you, yeah? Even if I’m not soothing like the womb or whatever. Doesn’t matter if anyone else wants you or doesn’t. I got you, and I’m keeping you, that’s all you gotta know.”

The baby regards her drowsily and wriggles her head away, rosy-cheeked and satiated; when Kiriona tips her forward and rubs her back, she burps twice and spits up spectacularly. “Nice one. Let’s go see your granddad, he’s gonna love your new look.”

***

With the baby strapped to her back, the bunny securely tied around one epaulet by its ear, and the nappy bag in hand, Kiriona sets off into the halls again to find her father. In a rude mirror of yesterday, she instead finds Petty Officer Vav in the narrow hall to the Emperor’s suite, looking rumpled and not even trying to hide a bruising hickey on soft flesh of their throat.

“Your Divine Highness.” They salute, a little wobbly.

“Hey.” Kiriona tries extremely hard not to look at the hickey, and makes uncomfortable eye contact instead. Vav’s eyes are a cool light brown, with a warmer splotch on the left one. “Did you hear the news?”

“Yes! Yessir. I’m so relieved. Worried about the OB of course, but all told…”

“Anybody you know?”

“A few. Distant cousins. One of them wrote my recommendation for the Alexandrites.” Vav’s round cheek twitches up into a smile, and a flush burns at the tips of their ears. “That’s, ah…a front line unit.”

“Huh. Well. We’ll get them back,” Kiriona foolishly assures.

“Yes, sir.” Their gaze shifts, goes gooey. “And don’t you look charming,” they coo to the baby. “Very fierce.”

“It’s the eyebrows,” says Kiriona, and Vav laughs.

“Yes, awfully serious. And I can’t wait to get a look at this outfit when it comes down to the laundry. Are those teeth?” But when Kiriona shifts her weight subtly in the direction of her father’s rooms, Vav pulls back. “I’m sorry to keep you, sir. It’s just that I thought you might want to…” They make a gesture with their hands that she can’t even begin to interpret. “...give him a few minutes, before you pop in.”

They shield the hickey belatedly with their palm—not quite a nervous reaction, but awkward—and Kiriona takes a cleansing breath. “Listen, if you want me to tell him to lay off you…”

Vav blinks at her. Smiles again, smaller than before, almost shy, and lays a hand gently over her bicep. “You’re very gallant, sir. But no.”

Kiriona nods. “Got it. Great. Then I super do not want to know any more about it.”

“Understood,” says Vav, with a sharper salute, and they let her go.

She dawdles down the hallway, wary of further mental scarring; when she puts on her big girl pants and palms the autodoor control, she finds the Necromancer Divine slumped over his cuppa, in pajama bottoms and a threadbare robe that definitely hasn’t been washed in recent memory. Neither has his hair been washed, by the look of it. There’s a second cup at the table, empty, and a biscuit with one bite taken out of it—the runner-up kind of biscuit, still out of his favorite apparently, though she doesn’t know what the difference is other than the shape. He smiles soppily at her when she steps in, and gestures at the chair opposite, pushing the empty teacup aside. “Kiriona! My favorite kid.”

“Your only kid, unless you’re hiding something else.”

“Just don’t tell your sister I play favorites,” he says, with a mouth full of too-white teeth. “And bring my little grandbaby over here, won’t you? I think she’s actually gotten bigger.”

Reluctantly Kiriona perches in the chair; carefully unwinds the baby from her back. “How munted are you today?”

“Really, Kiriona. I’m God. I won’t damage her just by holding her a while.”

“Fine.”

“Oh, look at you,” he gushes as she passes the baby over; he sits her on the table with a hand at the back of her head. “A fearsome baby shark! How about Taniwha, for your name? Very powerful and oceanic.”

The baby slaps at his face with her miniscule hands, drawn in by his eyes, the same as everyone. Kiriona unties the bunny from her shoulder and passes it over. “No.”

“She needs a name. We can’t just keep calling her ‘the baby’ for the rest of her life.” He dangles the bunny in front of her face, and she flails for it somewhat ineffectively. “Her Imperial Highness, The Baby, Princess of the Nine Houses.”

“She’ll get a name when I think of the right one,” says Kiriona, slouching sullenly in her chair.

Her father nuzzles his nose to the baby’s; she squeals and whaps him with the bunny now squeezed in her surprising grip. “Oh! Oh! So strong! My baby shark, do do do do do do…”

“What are you doing?”

“Babies like music, don’t they?”

Gideon doesn’t know. How the fuck would she? Nobody ever sang to her.

Her father tucks the baby against his chest, where she settles with the arm of the bunny shoved in her mouth; he bends his head to sing softly in her ear. A completely idiotic song that just keeps repeating itself until Kiriona wants to scream, wants to throw things, wants to rip the baby out of his arms. Her limbs start to ache with it, so she pulls back a little, floats halfway out of herself until whatever is happening inside her settles into a dull throb, an empty socket where a tooth of feeling should be.

“Is she asleep?” he whispers, eventually, and Kiriona hooks back into her body enough to say,

“Yeah. Arba says babies like heartbeats.”

The Emperor looks at her like he’s studying a theorem he can’t quite sort out; it’s horrible, so she looks down at her hands instead, picking at a torn fingernail. “Who’s Arba?” he asks.

“Her nanny.”

“Ah.”

In the quiet she can hear the baby’s sleeping breaths, quick little nasally puffs with teensy, probably sub-par lungs.

“Dad?” she says, and she can feel his attention searing her, hot as Dominicus. “Can you…fix me?”

He’s quiet for the length of time it takes her to breathe, in and out, five times. There’s still a residual coating of sand rattling in her lungs, and she focuses on that, the irritating scrape of it, to keep her weighted down. “Kiriona,” he says at last. “You don’t need to be fixed. You’re wonderful just as you are.”

Eyes still downturned, she shakes her head. “No, I mean…give me a heartbeat? Make it so I’m not so cold? I think it would be better. For her.”

“Oh, dear one,” he sighs, low and tired. “I can’t.”

She squeezes her eyes closed; squeezes her hands closed. “But you’re God.”

“Harrowhark said the very same thing to me.”

That stings, an electric jolt; when she looks at him, his face is carefully, infinitely gentle.

“That’s precisely why I can’t. You’re my daughter. God’s daughter. That makes you a target, Kiriona, for anyone wanting to get to me through you. Your body is the best work I’ve done in ten thousand years. You’re untouchable, graceful, strong. To make you simple flesh again, with my blood flowing through you… You’d be even more attractive to our enemies. Both you and the baby would be unbearably vulnerable, and we don’t yet know what will come of your encounter on Antioch today. What danger it could pose.”

“So it’s not that you can’t fix me,” Kiriona says, at last holding his eyes. “It’s that you won’t.”

The King Undying has the gall to give her his tough love face. “There’s more at stake here than easier bedtimes.”

“Right.” She gets to her feet, shouldering the nappy bag. “I’d better put her back in her cot, she’s been off the grave dirt for a while.”

He lets her lift the baby out of his hands; she doesn’t know what she would do if he didn’t.

***

Ianthe’s door whisks open after only a minimum of knocking—Kiriona was prepared to stand there at least another fifteen minutes—and her sister prince, in a white nightgown that isn’t terribly opaque and barely reaches her thighs, groans with exaggerated distaste. “What in God’s dark cosmos do you want?”

The baby is awake again and grizzling unhappily against Kiriona’s shoulder; she twists side to side, absently, trying to forestall a meltdown. “Could you make a fake heart?”

“What?” says Ianthe, disgusted, but she leaves the door open when she whirls away.

It’s been more than a month since Kiriona was here last, and in the intervening time, the vat womb has been relocated—or possibly destroyed. “A fake heart. That beats. That I could wear.”

Ianthe sprawls on her bed, louche, displaying an amount of pallid thigh that’s bordering on pornographic. She is, put simply, the worst. But she regards Kiriona with sincere consideration; genius necromancers never can resist a challenge. “Is it the beating you need? Or the blood? Body heat?”

“Both would be nice. I’m getting tired of keeping a hot water bottle between my tits, it cools off too fast.”

“Mm, a charming solution, but not very efficient.” Ianthe’s gaze unfocuses then, sliding through her as she thinks. “Simple circulatory, then…something like a flatworm, perhaps?”

This question doesn’t seem to require an answer, which is lucky, because it’s too disgusting to consider responding to.

Then the baby, sensing the lack of attention directly on her and likely needing a new nappy again, winds up to her “the world is unutterably cruel” cry, and Ianthe’s face flickers from panic to rage before flattening into simple nope. She’s off the bed like a shot, spinning Kiriona round by the shoulders and shoving her back toward the door. “All right. Get out.”

“Babies cry—”

“I’ll work on your little project, Gonad, but I will not endure that awful racket in my own sanctuary ever again. Goodnight.”

In the morning, there’s a flattish box outside Kiriona’s door, about the size and shape of two books side by side. She opens it, unfolding layers of thin tissue, to find a white standard-issue singlet with freshly sewn-in padding down the chest and back. The padding is warm, she suspects; it moves, gelatinous, when she presses. When she holds it up to her ear, she’s met with the faint, rhythmic thudding of a heartbeat.

DO NOT send this to that slut at the laundry, says a note in Ianthe’s loopy hand. It’s DELICATE. Take it in the sonic when it’s dirty or sluggish, the vibrations will stimulate the proto-heart.

“She wrote ‘vibrations,’” Kiriona says to her diminutive night boss. “And ‘stimulate.’”

The baby, wriggling on her tummy on the carpet, eloquently shrieks.

Chapter Text

A quiet moment together.

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Chapter Text

“You’ve reversed it again. Look, like this.”

“I can do it myself!”

“You patently cannot, Gonad. When I’m finished with your bracelet it will be a work of art; I would prefer mine to at least not be embarrassingly untidy.”

“Well, you’re a shit teacher,” Kiriona gripes, and leans back so Ianthe can get her hands on the half-knotted bracelet pinned to her trouser knee. With her teeth, ugh, her sister prince unpicks the last two knots.

“It’s despicable that I have to teach you at all. What do children do for fun on the Ninth?”

“There’s no such thing as fun on the Ninth. Or children.”

“That explains a great deal.”

More carefully, Kiriona redoes her knots and continues the pattern. Two more, and then reverse again— “How did you learn?”

Ianthe is farther along in her bracelet-making, but not by that much—the cords keep getting caught in the crevices between her bone fingers. “Babs picked it up at cavalier sleepaway camp when we were eight.”

“Aww, did he make one for you?”

Ianthe’s smile is tight and mean. “Only after Corona cried buckets of crocodile tears about him leaving me out. She’s always excelled at pretending.”

“You know, you’re both pretty fucked up.”

“Oh, Kiriona. Do you know anyone who isn’t?”

Ianthe finishes first, slithering periodically sideways into Kiriona’s space to measure the length against her wrist before finally knotting it on her. It’s thick, the edges even and precise; three diamond shapes radiate out around its circumference in a headache of mismatched colors, everything that could be wheedled out of Vav in exchange for one of the silken hankies Kiriona bought on Antioch.

(“The diamonds represent your speed holes,” explained her sister prince as she sketched out the pattern with a cool, needling expression. “They’re the orifices where you can shove it,” Kiriona fired back without real heat; Ianthe’s smile widened and she curled two golden fingers with vivid eloquence. “Don’t threaten me with a good time.”)

“There,” drawls Ianthe now. “A new sacrament in our holy sisterhood. And don’t leave me hanging, I’ll be simply devastated.”

“I’m getting there,” Kiriona grumbles, and the Saint of Awe sprawls back imperiously against the arm of the couch, shoving her rude stocking feet under Kiriona’s thigh, and pulls a pack of cigarettes from her pocket.

“I will pop both of your lungs like plex wrap if you smoke in my room.”

Petulant, Ianthe pulls out a cigarette anyway and lets it dangle between her lips; it jumps irritatingly when she speaks. “I wasn’t going to light it.”

“Your oral fixation is really something.”

“And do you often find yourself thinking about my mouth?” says Ianthe, with lascivious eyebrow activity.

Now doubly irritated, Kiriona painstakingly knots three more rows with the unwelcome addition of the other prince’s disparaging commentary; then a warble rises from the blanket laid out on Kiriona’s bed, and Ianthe kicks her in the knee.

“Do something about that.”

Kiriona gets to her feet, the unfinished bracelet dangling from her trousers by the pin. “Thanks ever so, Tridentarius—I can’t imagine what I’d do about this crying infant if you weren’t here to guide me.”

“You know I despise the sound. It gives me the most unbelievable urge to rend things.”

“Door’s right there.” She gestures, and Ianthe scowls, pucker-mouthed around her drooping cig. She makes no move to leave; only pulls a tablet out of a pocket of her iridescent robes and starts poking vehemently at the screen.

The baby, laid down on the mattress to nap between rolled-up plackets of grave dirt a good two hours ago, sucks in a breath to wail her demands when she spots Kiriona leaning over her. She submits to a nappy change with as much outrage and as little grace as possible, but settles fast once a bottle is clutched in her imperious mouth.

“Finally.” Ianthe, equally imperious, draws her knees up when Kiriona sinks against the opposite arm of the couch, and braces their feet against each other. “Babies are terribly spoilt, in my opinion. If I carried on like that every time I had the inclination, there’d be no time for anything else.”

“Unfortunately for me, you learned how to talk instead,” mutters Kiriona. The baby, now propped comfortably against her thighs, watches her with those coal-dark eyes and thunderous brows as she sucks; her squashy hands rest relaxed against the bottle and Kiriona’s hand, softly curled, like dusky flowers.

Ianthe is watching her too, coolly, over the top of her tablet and their bent knees. “Regular people talk. An Imperial Prince commands, Kiriona. You might try it sometime. You’re not just a cavalier anymore.”

“I was never a cavalier,” says Gideon.

In the quiet, Ianthe’s tablet peeps with a message; the baby, displeased by the angle of the bottle or the temperature of the room or by some other factor only discernible to her, kicks her feet fussily into Kiriona’s stomach.

“Another unscheduled Admiralty meeting,” Ianthe sighs.

“I hate meetings.”

“Nobody likes meetings. It’s like saying you hate menstrual cramps.”

Kiriona cocks her head and points at herself. “Corpse, remember? Don’t surf that crimson wave.”

“No, neither do I. We’re above petty biological concerns.” Absently Ianthe swipes her finger across her tablet screen. “Let’s play hooky. Whatever Sarpedon wants can surely wait.”

“That’s not un-princely or something?”

“God, no. It’s practically expected; Corona and I used to cut Court all the time. We’d dress each other up in ridiculous outfits and go to the training field to embarrass Babs.”

Kiriona snorts, trying to imagine an outfit that would look ridiculous on Coronabeth. “I used to skive off services.”

“Color me unsurprised,” drawls Ianthe. “You’ve never seemed much of a nun.”

“Nope.” Kiriona pops the p obnoxiously. “And Harrow got sick of dragging me there kicking and screaming.” Scowling intensely, her aphotic imperator squirms and spits out the bottle. “Oh, finished, are you? Positive? All right, all right…”

“This was better when it wasn’t looking at me,” Ianthe mutters as Kiriona turns the baby over against her thighs to pat her back.

“Just wiggle this at her, will you? I’m trying to teach her how to grab things better.”

Ianthe takes the proffered toy, a nest of salvaged interlocking rubber tubes with the rounded head of a humerus rattling about inside, as though Kiriona had offered her a decomposing rat—but she dangles it as instructed, and the baby’s arms wave disjointedly in her direction. She’s getting better at lifting her head on her own, though she keeps getting tired and bonking her chin back down on Kiriona’s knees.

Kiriona can imagine precisely the face the baby is making when Ianthe says: “The resemblance to Harry is truly astonishing. You’d never know I had anything to do with it.”

“Lucky for her.” They glance at each other over the baby’s sooty-tufted head, and there’s the barest flicker of something raw and stinging in Ianthe’s face, like peeling the filmy skin away from the top layer of an onion.

Then the autodoor slides open unannounced, admitting the only person other than Ianthe who has the necessary rank to override the lock.

“So you’re both here,” says the Emperor, accusatory in all his rumpled divinity. “I suppose that saves me the walk aft.”

“We’re developing the princess’ motor skills,” says Ianthe sweetly, and Kiriona resists the urge to kick her in the shin.

“As pleased as I am to see you taking an interest in little Enoha’s development—”

“Nope, not naming her that either.”

“—there are more immediate matters we need to discuss.”

There’s a tiredness about the Lord of the Resurrection when he sinks onto the edge of Kiriona’s bed, as though the artificial gravity is pulling harder on him; his stubble is several days’ growth at least. “Number Seven has made a rather sudden move.”

Ianthe’s posture straightens, sharpens. “Are we still tracking it?”

The Emperor leans his elbows on his knees, looks at them both from under his brows. “There’s no need. It’s parked itself in the Ur system, in orbit around New Rho.”

“In orbit?” Ianthe repeats, her forehead furrowed. “Is that…typical?”

“Not in the slightest.”

Then the Emperor and his Saint stare at each other in weighted silence, as though they are on the same page of a book Kiriona hasn’t even cracked open. When no elaboration is forthcoming, she asks: “So what is it doing there, then?”

“Well,” says her father, with the air of someone giving the clue that cracks the case wide open, “Resurrection Beasts only want one thing.”

Kiriona can’t help a waggle of her eyebrows. “Then I hope New Rho is being safe—”

“Gonad,” Ianthe hisses, infuriated. “The Beasts follow God, and they follow Lyctors.”

Now they’re both looking at Kiriona—her father with gentle expectation, Ianthe with a weird, barely-veiled hunger. “Lyctors,” she says, jokes forgotten, and feels suddenly as if she’s drifting away from herself without intending to. She tries to focus on what little her dead body can feel: the weight of the flesh magic vest Ianthe crafted laid against her chest; the baby’s wriggling back under her palm. “Harrow.”

“Or if we’re extremely fortunate, Harrow and Gideon—retro edition,” says the Emperor, and now there’s a shadow of that hunger in his face too, in the intensity of his eyes. Kiriona doesn’t correct him—she doesn’t have any fucks left, just now, for her dead namesake or his remnant cav.

Sensing that she has not been the center of attention for several minutes in a row, the baby shrieks with angry little donkey kicks of her legs; Ianthe shoves the rubber tube toy at her in a startle that would be funny at any other time, and Kiriona absently bounces her with her thighs. “Then let’s go. Now. Let’s go get them.”

“I should go,” Ianthe counters. “Kiriona’s still needed on Antioch, there are more devils every day.”

“There is no fucking way—”

God holds up his hands, placating. “Neither of you will be going anywhere just yet. Girls, you’re forgetting that the physical presence of a Resurrection Beast drives any necromancers in sight range quite uncontrollably mad.”

“I’m not a necromancer,” Kiriona protests.

“No. But many of our Cohort troops stationed on New Rho are. The situation there has become volatile; Blood of Eden are attempting to wrest control away from our debilitated forces, and a civilian rebellion has erupted. Sarpedon’s sent you both the full report. We need time to craft a plan for retaking control.”

All business now, Ianthe tosses the toy aside and unfolds herself from Kiriona’s couch. “I’ll review the report and make recommendations at our morning meeting, Teacher.”

“Thank you, Ianthe,” says the Emperor, weary again. Then Ianthe’s gone in a flurry of nacreous robes, and he sighs. “She’ll have six ingenious plans by breakfast—but I wish I ever knew what she was thinking.”

“She’s thinking she’s going to swoop in and rescue Harrow without me.”

Her father scrubs his hands across his face—grimaces at the state of his stubble—clasps his hands together instead, hanging between his knees. He pins her with his oil-slick eyes, deeply shadowed. “Kiriona…I know Harrowhark is a tender subject for you. But I want you to know that I have searched for her. Just as I searched for you, and found you. My lost sheep… I have scoured the River; there are ears and eyes in every corner of the galaxy, everywhere our people are, on the lookout. And I know Ianthe has mounted her own search, quietly, and I haven’t interfered.”

That’s news to her, but she should have expected as much. Ianthe, no matter what she pretends with friendship crafts and anecdotes, is a closed door—and Kiriona’s under no illusions as to which side she’s on. Against her bent legs, the baby squirms and rubs at her face with groggy fists; Kiriona resettles her against her chest, the false heartbeat, and gives her the bunny to gum on.

“Ah, she’s spit up a little—” Her father gestures, then gets up from the bed and comes to join her on the shitty couch. “What I’m trying to say is that this could be a promising lead—but it’s also utterly out of character for any RB, and we just can’t know for certain what it means.”

Kiriona can feel her own face harden. “I don’t give two steaming shits—if there’s a chance she’s there, I’m going.”

“I understand,” he says, laying a palm light against her knee. “I’m only trying to manage your expectations. Harrowhark may not be there; if she is there, Number Seven’s proximity will have profound negative effects, and she hasn’t got much of your soul still inside her to draw from. She may be permanently damaged by the time we can get to her. She may not survive.”

Ice, all down the center line of her, in spite of the flesh magic vest. “Then let me—”

“I won’t stop you, when it’s time to go,” says the Emperor, stern now. “But you need to understand the obstacles. You’ll have to travel through the River, which will take preparation, and will require your sister to go with you. And you’ll have to leave little Mohi behind.” He reaches out with all his gentleness, to touch the baby’s flushed cheek.

“Lay off the names,” Kiriona grinds out—and then her father touches her cheek, and it jolts her like a static shock. Her tethers all twang, little misfires of feelings cut off from their proper paths.

He looks, suddenly, like he might cry; the frozen hole in her throat aches. “Are you waiting for Harrowhark?” he asks, infinitely gentle. “To name her?” When she doesn’t answer the moment swells between them like a bruise, and he pulls back. “All right. All right, what do you think of Rehopoama, then?”

Kiriona presses her mouth to the baby’s head, inhales the soap smell of her last bath. “Where do you even get these?”

“Oh,” sighs her father, slumping back into the too-thin cushions. “Ancient stories. Ancient even when I was young, before the Resurrection.” She can feel his eyes on her, and she stubbornly does not look up. “They’re part of your heritage, Kiriona. Our heritage. I regret not preserving it better. I regret not knowing you were mine, out there alone on the Ninth.”

Now she does look up, feeling jangly, as though her frozen meat has been hollowed out and refilled with shining silver buttons and jagged chips of bone.

When she was only little, in the dark hole where she was raised, she’d said it so many times. What if someone important came looking for her, their long-lost baby? How Harrow would suffer then—and Crux, and the great aunts, and every boot that had ever kicked her or hand that brought her pain. The only heritage she could conceive of then was “important.” The only parent she could imagine was one who wanted her, and had been denied. Anything less was too hopeless to light the bleakness; anything more complex, more detailed, felt so unreal it burned her as surely as the cold Ninth air.

She doesn’t know how to have this. How to have a father the universe bends to obey; a father who wants her, and wants her to be Kiriona Gaia, and wants her to be an unkillable corpse.

But he wants her.

Her father has tipped his head back, staring at the ceiling, his perfectly average, ordinary hands folded in his lap. “I tried not to think about the Ninth, for a very long time. To put her out of my mind, as well as out of my sight.”

“Your cavalier.”

“Yes. My Annabel. She wasn’t…quite human. I think she wasn’t quite sane.”

“Who is?” Kiriona mutters, and her father huffs a pale imitation of a laugh.

“Big mood,” he says, inexplicably. Then: “I thought I could rebuild the whole world for her. Avenge everyone who died unjustly, and start over. With Annabel, I could live forever—keep us on the right path. But I’m so tired, Kiriona.” His eyelids sink closed, as though he doesn’t even have the energy to hold them open. “And now that I have my princes—and my little princess—I wonder if the universe might get on just as well without me.”

“I thought Dominicus would literally implode without you.”

His mouth purses and his eyebrows raise, consideringly. “Given a little time to prepare, I’m sure I could sort that out,” he says. “But as long as Annabel sleeps, as long as she still exists, I have no hope of release. I won’t grow old and pass on with my beloved family around me—only go on and on, while the universe rages until everything is dust.”

Kiriona curls her arms closer around the baby, who twitches in her sleep. “Okay.”

Her father opens one eye to look at her.

“I get why you drink so much.”

He barks a genuine laugh. “I’m a man of simple vices.”

Quiet settles, waiting; just the baby’s quick, huffing breaths and the little ticks and groans of a working, moving ship around them. “So what would happen,” Kiriona ventures at last, “if you did…kill Annabel?”

The Emperor turns his head to look at her, with the full, quiet attention of his awful eyes. “I don’t think I could,” he says. “She was always the fighter, not me. She took to the sword like she was born for it. Rather like you.”

“Then…what if I could do it for you?”

The opalescent rings in his eyes seem to expand, widening, as if the blackness inside them could swallow her. “You might be the only one who could, Kiriona.”

She tries to breathe; can’t quite remember how that goes. Feels for the baby’s pattering heartbeat through her back, the fluttery expansions of her ribs. “What would happen?”

“I would be mortal,” says her father. “Eventually, I would die. Rather quickly, if my enemies understood what had happened.” Then he smiles, the smallest, most hopeful smile she’s ever seen on his face. “But I’d have you to protect me, wouldn’t I? The greatest cavalier ever produced by the Ninth House.”

Now it’s Kiriona’s empty chest that pangs, sharp as a spike.

“I would mourn my Annabel,” her father continues. “Of course I would. I still dream about her.” His smile quirks up. “And Harrowhark, sometimes—I think they’re more than a bit alike.”

“I used to dream about Harrow too,” Kiriona admits, and the stabbing pain through her dead body draws back, creating a sucking vacuum in its wake.

Her father nods, sympathetic. Lays his hand on her knee again, tender, reserved. “I would mourn. But I would be free.”

But I would be free.

***

After the baby’s fed and down for the night—five or six hours at a go these days, which might be more than Harrow ever slept contiguously in her life—Kiriona lays herself down too, in her underused bed, her jacket draped over the arm of the couch and a finished bracelet for Ianthe on the bedside table. She keeps her heartbeat on, for when the baby wakes, and closes her eyes, and attempts to sleep.

For a while she thinks she’s forgotten how. That she’ll just lay here all night in the quiet, painfully present, waiting for a cry, as she’s been doing—

—and then there’s something different about the dark, strange refractions of light that shift and scatter around the room, off the tiles, off the surface of the water as Harrow splashes her fists into it, into Gideon’s chest. In the murky dim Harrow’s eyes are the most lightless thing; the paint is sloughing off her face, revealing filmy swatches of pale brown beneath.

Gideon presses her mouth to one bare patch, tasting salt and paint and blood—then they’re under the water, Harrow writhing ferally in her arms, kicking and scratching and screaming out all her air—and then Harrow’s gone, and she’s alone, in water so deep and dark she may never see the surface. The well, of Harrow’s making, a dark throat in which Gideon is perpetually lodged. High above, she can see little flashes—like the glint of far-off Dominicus from the Ninth’s landing tier—of Ianthe, and God, and all the heinous old bastards he called friends.

The water around her roils. With unexpected force she’s spit up to the top in a bubbling frenzy, smacked against the insides of her own eyes in a way that feels familiar but somehow not right—and in a different dark, moving about a different nighttime room, she sees the lean gray shadow of Camilla Hect.

Sharp eyes, pale and clear, catch her looking—and she squeezes her eyelids shut tight, and pretends to sleep.

***

“—and all the names he suggests are old as balls, like older-than-the-Resurrection-old. And I want to hear about all that, I guess. Where he came from, because that’s kinda where I came from. But she’s a tiny baby, she doesn’t need all that dragging her down, you know?”

“Sure,” Arba says, mid-nappy change, as Kiriona digs deep into the crud on her boots with a brush. “A baby this cool needs a really cool name.”

“See, you get it!” Kiriona gestures too emphatically, and crusted flakes of who-knows-what scatter across the rug. “Shit.”

“Something tough,” says Arba, getting excited. “Something badass.” Then, in a smiling baby voice: “Don’t you? Don’t you, little Skullcrusher?”

The baby shrieks with laughter; with surprising accuracy she whacks Arba in the face with the toy in her grip, a soft rattle full of remnant uniform buttons.

“Ouch! Ouch! Ooh, you got me! Match to Doombringer Gaia, Princess of the First!”

“These are way better than my dad’s suggestions so far.” Satisfied with her boots, Kiriona shoves them on her feet and starts sweeping up the mess she made. “She deserves the most badass name possible.”

“Where’s your foot? Where’s your foot? There it is! Where’s your other foot? There it is!”

These declarations are met with another chorus of hiccupy giggles, and Kiriona sighs. “I ought to name her after you, she hardly ever laughs like that for me.”

“Don’t mope, she’s just happy in the morning, she had a good sleep and woke up to a nice bottle. Isn’t that right, Annihilation Arba?”

“See, that has a ring to it!”

Arba laughs, swoops the baby up above her head, toothy romper hood flopping, then swims her through the air on her belly. “Look out, clear the beach! It’s Sharknado Nav!”

“What the fuck is a—” Kiriona blinks; her tethers quiver, and her limbs all freeze up. “Nav?”

Arba swings the baby onto her hip. “Uh…yeah. You know.”

So suddenly detached that her joints might actually creak, she turns to stare. “Obviously I know, it’s my name. But how do you know?”

The lieutenant makes a series of terrible faces, that range from discomfort to guilt to inexplicable grief. “I…knew who you were when I came aboard. That’s why I asked to be assigned here.”

“I thought you were here to find a new cavalier,” says Kiriona. She feels like she’s several steps behind; she hasn’t felt that in a while.

“I am, that too,” Arba says—then, reading something in Kiriona’s expression: “No, no, not you. I mean, not because you’re not amazing, there are like seven hundred other reasons.” She puffs up her cheeks and blows out an agitated breath as Kiriona watches her, bracing herself for—for what? Kiriona doesn’t know.

But she can see in the lieutenant, more than usual, the gaunt lines of loss that hollow her face. It’s in the way she stands, and the way she passes the baby over and then scrubs her hands through her wild hair, in need of a trim. “I wasn’t…I wasn’t going to tell you.”

Kiriona raises an eyebrow. “You still haven’t told me.”

Arba drops down onto the edge of Kiriona’s bed, looking unbearably young. She studies her hands as she says: “I think you were the last person to see my sister alive.”

What?

“She had this diary—it was in her effects, when her body was returned. I read it. I just wanted to know…anything. Anything at all. And she wrote about everything. How excited she was, at the start. And then how scared.” Arba scrubs at her face with the heels of her hands. “She wrote about you, a lot. That you were the kind of cav she wanted to be. So I thought…I thought I’d see for myself.”

Gideon gets her limbs all working long enough to sit on the bed too. Breathes, to feel the last few grains of sand pelting around in her lungs. “Jeannemary.”

“Yeah.”

“She—” Gideon tries. Stops. Closes her eyes, but closed or open, she can see it just the same. The musty old bed. The spears of bone; the blood. The cooling weight of her body, compact muscle and teenaged bird bones. “She was ten times the cav I was.”

Hannah Arba—Jeannemary’s sister—laughs, wet, and tips her head against Gideon’s arm. “She’d lose her mind to hear you say that. She had a little crush on you, I think. That’s how I knew your Ninth name. She drew a big starburst around it. Also ‘nineteen inches’ with a bunch of exclamation marks, I don’t know what that was about.”

If she had working tear ducts she might cry; instead a slightly hysterical laugh bubbles out of her, and the baby cackles in reply. “She measured my biceps at the Fifth’s anniversary dinner.”

Arba groans and covers her face. “Nooooo…what a dork.”

***

Ianthe’s ingenious plan, in the immediate, is to have a lark learning how to pilot a shuttle through the River with God while Kiriona plows through endless pockets of horrible maw-eyed devils day after day. Kiriona protests this, mightily. Her father does not care, nor do the admirals.

So for another week, stretching into two, stretching into a restless month, Prince Kiriona Gaia leads terrified Cohort troops against devils—revenants, they now understand, like her, but not like her—in living bodies, in dead bodies, in civilians and Edenites and their own fallen soldiers. When the living soldiers following her are exhausted, they heave the possessed bodies into the backs of trucks and dump them in an empty lot near the barracks. Then fresh adepts and infantry with heavy swords take them apart—and Kiriona Gaia, who doesn’t have to smell it if she pulls away from herself far enough, douses the pieces with accelerant and stands guard until they burn down to ash.

The first time she came back to the ship reeking of human barbecue, Arba blanched pale as flimsy and very nearly hurled on Kiriona’s floor. Kiriona doesn’t ask—she remembers, with a guilty twinge, the glimpses she’s gotten of the lieutenant’s shrapnel scars. So now she swipes sets of athletic clothes from the barracks for the wetwork and the fire, showers and scrubs and changes before catching the shuttle back to the Seat.

She’s still damp-haired and water-warmed when she gets to her room, to find Ianthe on the couch with the baby in her lap.

Her sister prince smiles, an expression as greasy and pleasant as a puddle of oil. “Welcome home, darling.”

“What the fuck are you doing?”

“Just spending a little quality time,” says Ianthe, with an airy smile. Then she gestures to Arba, standing stiffly by the desk Kiriona never uses with a blank, hard face. “I told your guard dog she didn’t need to stay, but she insisted.”

Arba’s mouth tightens; Kiriona crosses the room with carefully measured ease, and plucks the baby up into her arms. “She’s following my orders.”

“So you do know how to command, after all!” Ianthe trills, delighted. “Congratulations on your personal growth, Gonad.”

“It’s been a long day, Tridentarius. What do you want.”

“It’s what the Emperor wants, actually. He’d like us to take a little family trip into the River.”

“What, now?”

“Unless you’ve got something else to do.”

Kiriona considers this; the immediate impulse to say no to anything Ianthe seems to want, and to most things her father wants, is powerful. But she will have to travel through the River, if she’s going to get to Harrow. She looks over at Arba, still standing at attention. “Can you stay a little longer?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Why not bring the little bundle of joy along?” suggests Ianthe, eyeing the baby, who’s mouthing hungrily at her own fist. “I’m sure God can find a way to keep one infant safe.”

That one is quite easy to deny, and she hands the baby off to Arba. “No. And we have to be back before her bedtime.”

Ianthe gets to her feet with the narrow and twisting grace of a cobra. “I make no guarantees. Come along, then. Toodle-oo, Lieutenant. I’ll visit again soon.”

***

Her father is unequivocally drunk, and reeks of old sweat. Ianthe ignores this, aside from the barest wrinkle of her nose when they close themselves into the little shuttle together. This one is different from the ones that go back and forth to the planet, and when Kiriona comments on it, Ianthe informs her it’s a newer model, experimental and therefore worse for most Cohort purposes.

“Ziz-class,” she says absently, buckling herself into the pilot seat and working through a series of checks.

“Spot on,” agrees the Emperor. “With some special warding, for River travel. There’s still the pressure, you know? Slightly different from the shielding needed for space flight. And there’s the special fuel, and the power drain to compensate for.”

“And like, a billion slavering ghosts,” adds Kiriona, “right?”

Her father holds up a finger, his eyes lighting. “Ah! Well! That’s precisely why I wanted to take this little trip. Now buckle in, buckle in. Just remember that you don’t need to breathe. Ianthe?”

“Systems ready, Teacher.”

“All right, take us out.” The engines hum harder, rumbling through the steel under her feet; then there’s water under her feet, murky and brackish and quickly rising. The Emperor gestures to the wide viewport, unconcerned, even eager, a manic sort of energy coming into his eyes. “Now, Kiriona, you were correct. The main danger of the River—for us I mean, who can withstand the pressure—and, I suppose, for anyone else, if you could protect them—you know, Cassiopeia once made this sort of bubble thing as an experiment and tested it with a rabbit—”

“The ghosts, Lord,” nudges Ianthe.

“Yes, right. The main danger was the ghosts. They might pull your soul from your body, if you couldn’t keep hold; shred that soul to pieces and attach themselves to the space left behind.”

“Like the devils.” Kiriona looks out the viewport, and then down at the rising water, now lapping around her waist.

Her father brightens even further. “Yes! Yes, precisely. But as you can see, the section of the River we’re now navigating into is conspicuously quiet and empty of ravenous spirits.” He gestures around them to the empty water that’s now rising fast up her neck; she can’t help but suck in a breath as it covers her mouth, and her nose, and then is over her head—

“Breathe out,” her father tells her. “Slow. That’s it. You’re all right. You can breathe, if that feels better.”

She does—it does.

“As I was saying…ah...”

“The tower,” says Ianthe.

“Yes, the tower. Well, the tower is…hmm. How to explain.”

“No, I meant, the tower,” says Ianthe again, and points out the viewport.

At first all that’s visible is a pillar of gray stones cutting vertically through the water outside; through the nebulous dim, it seems to go on forever in both directions. Then Ianthe leans into a lever on the control panel, and the whole shuttle tips, up, up—

The tower rises far above them, bursting through the water’s surface into whatever lies above; Kiriona can just barely make out a bellcote at the top, like the bells at the height of Drearburh.

“What the fuck?” she asks, bewildered, and her father stands, wobbly, pacing through the cloudy water.

“A relic of the Resurrection,” he says with sudden quiet sobriety. “Its presence frightens even the ghosts; its presence is a harbinger of the devils you are so valiantly fighting, Kiriona.” He stands beside the viewport, beside Ianthe’s chair, and he draws that terrible divinity around himself that counteracts his bad posture and his worn-out shirts and his unwashed hair. “But I am the King Over the River. The devils will not escape Antioch; the seventh Beast of the Resurrection will not stand in the way of our progress through the universe. I entrust these tasks to you, girls.” He lays a hand on Ianthe’s shoulder; looks back to fix Kiriona with his eyes. “My Princes Over the Tower.”

Chapter Text

Day One

Ianthe’s been cagey—cagier than usual—the last few days, and this is how Kiriona knows it’s almost go time. So after another day of slaughter and burning and smoke, she stops by Ianthe’s room before going back to her own. The wards that blocked off her hall have long since been cleaned up; there are always fresh wards around her actual door, but they’ve never activated against Kiriona before, so she has no reason to hesitate as she reaches out to override the door lock. She does get the door open—and her fingernails sizzled right off, for her trouble.

“You petty ward-happy bitch—” she starts, and then is drawn up short by the scene inside.

There’s a bone-and-membrane container, a body long and half a body wide, sitting open and shoved against a wall. On the bed is Ianthe’s body, folded into an unnaturally serene meditative pose. And standing in the middle of the room, twisting to regard her with familiar annoyance, is the half-naked corpse of Naberius Tern, doing up the fly of gleaming new white leather trousers.

“Okay,” says Kiriona, eyes drawn magnetically to the bloodless rapier wound through his bare chest, “are you keeping any more surprises in gross containers in the cargo bay? Because I can’t keep doing this.”

“Gonad,” says Tern, in his own hateful voice but Ianthe’s lazy drawl, “Of all the things you might walk in on me doing, this is one of the least preferable.”

Kiriona looks from the blank body of her sister prince on the bed to the waxy moving body in front of her. “Did you put lip gloss on him?”

“His lips were always terminally dry,” sighs Ianthe from inside her puppet. “A tragic genetic flaw. Help me with the shirt, would you?”

“Uh, no.”

A deeply put-upon sigh. “Fine. Better for me to practice, I suppose.”

Kiriona watches Ianthe-in-Naberius slip into a uniform shirt with some ease, and then fumble with the buttons. “You’re going too fast. Buttons are hard. I didn’t get undressed for weeks, they used to piss me off so much.”

Ianthe hums, thoughtful, and manages three buttons in a row.

“So? What the fuck are you doing?”

“Packing for my trip,” says her sister prince, absently. “You know I can’t go near Number Seven in my own body.”

“So you’re going to leave your body here…and ride this one? Through the River? All the way to New Rho?”

“That’s the idea. Poppa’s been training me; he thinks I’ll have no trouble.”

“You’re going soon, then,” says Kiriona, and Ianthe—Naberius—looks up at her with clouded blue, brown-flecked eyes.

“Are you going to miss me, Kiriona?” she coos, and it’s even worse coming out of Tern than it is from Ianthe.

“I’m gonna draw so many dicks on your face. In permanent marker.”

Ianthe sinks the last button, then jabs a finger at her. “Don’t fuck with my wards while I’m gone. I mean it. I’ve been tweaking them, you won’t make it through undamaged.” Then she knots an ascot around Naberius’ throat, pulls on a tailored uniform jacket identical to hers, but broader in the shoulders and longer in the arms. She’s already moving the corpse around with almost-living smoothness—she must have been practicing for some time. Then she examines herself in the full length mirror, Ianthe’s own sharp smile on Tern’s sculpted face. “There. Presentable, at least.”

“You still look mega-dead.”

“Yes, we match,” she simpers. Then she crosses to the bed and sits Naberius down beside her own body; covers her own hand with his. The corpse falls back against the pillows, and Ianthe, dressed in her own uniform trousers and shirtsleeves, jacket abandoned at the foot of her bed, unfolds and stretches her spidery limbs. Then—as if Kiriona isn't even there, except it's so clearly for her benefit—she reaches out on her knees, back bowed extravagantly, and plucks something from her strewn jacket; with her skeletal hand she tucks it almost lovingly into Naberius's breast pocket.

It's one of the handkerchiefs from Antioch, a lavender one Kiriona picked with bribery in mind.

"Did you steal that from my room?"

Ianthe fusses until the hanky is arranged to her satisfaction. "Please, you obviously bought it for me, and then left me hanging. At least Harry never beat around the bush."

Kiriona folds her arms across her chest, in a way she knows makes her look imposing. It’s never seemed to work on Ianthe, but it’s a comfort to pretend. “You really think she’s there. That you’ll find her.”

“If she’s there to find, I will find her.” Ianthe steps into her space, as infuriatingly tall as ever, and smiles. “I suppose that would change the dynamic around here.”

Not the way you’re hoping, Kiriona doesn’t say.

Light and deliberate, Ianthe lays a hand against Kiriona’s chest, just where the scarf tucks into the vee of her jacket, where the fake heart quietly beats. Ianthe’s red-bitten mouth—her face is threateningly close, all of a sudden—softly opens and then rises into a sweeter-than-usual smile. “Oh. You’re wearing the gift I made you,” she murmurs. “Just remember, Kiriona, who’s been here for you—and who left you behind.” And then she tips her face to one side, and—holy shit—kisses her, full on the mouth.

Just a single, tasting press—in itself rather chaste, though Ianthe’s hungry look when she pulls back is nothing of the kind.

“Now get out of my room,” she says, her eyes still on Kiriona’s mouth.

Confused, short-circuiting, all her tethers ringing like bells, Kiriona goes.

***

“Are you okay, sir?” says Arba, the minute she steps in the door. What kind of face must she be making? She tries to take stock, and fails.

“I don’t know,” she says, and retreats to the bathroom. Brushes her teeth and rinses her mouth with antiplaque, then suffers a sudden humiliating regret that she’s already erased the evidence of the only mouth kiss of her entire life and death—and the more humiliating wish that she could taste anything, so she’d know what Ianthe’s mouth tasted like. Whether it tasted awful, like kissing a slimy, nutrient-deprived necro freak should, or…

In the other room, the baby starts to cry; Kiriona rinses her mouth again, and splashes water on her face, and goes to fetch her.

“Listen, Arba,” she starts, hoisting the baby into her arms as the lieutenant measures out formula. “How long will you be on leave?”

The lieutenant shakes a bottle up absently. “As long as you need me, sir. I asked for an indefinite extension. And I…might have forged your signature on the request.”

“Oh.” Kiriona puffs a laugh. “Okay. Good. That’s good.”

With a sharper look, Arba hands over the bottle. “Is something happening?”

“Nothing to worry about. Thanks. Really. I’ll see you in the morning.”

Hannah Arba’s bullshit look is so much like Jeannemary’s—but she just kisses the baby goodbye and leaves them be.

***

When she goes to see her father, she finds him in bed in a dingy white singlet and shorts with big red hearts all over them. There are empty bottles on the bedside table and one empty and one half-empty on the floor beside the mattress, and if Kiriona thought he could die from alcohol poisoning she might be a little concerned at this point. His eyes are closed, which is a relief; there’s some kind of metal-and-plex device, roughly the size and shape of a thumb, dropped on his chest with wires coming out of it that attach to black plugs stuck into his ears.

Then his eyes flick open, fixing on her, and he smiles a warm and woozy smile. “Kiriona!” he shouts, too loud, and she slaps a hand down over his mouth.

“Quieter, she’s asleep,” she hisses; gestures to the bundle strapped to her back.

The Emperor gives a slow nod, and pulls one of the plugs from his ear. “Very sorry,” he says, in an exaggerated whisper, and then struggles upright, pulling a blanket around himself. “Sit down, sit down.”

There’s nowhere to sit but on his bed; reluctantly, she does. “You need a chair in here.”

“People don’t usually visit my bedroom just to chat,” he says, with zero shame.

“Ugh.” Now that he’s taken a plug out, she can hear tinny sound coming from it, too soft to coalesce into anything recognizable. “I think Ianthe’s planning to leave tomorrow,” she says, distracted, and John nods again with the same ponderous slowness.

“I believe so. And you still plan to go with her?”

“Yep.”

“Good. That’s good. That’s excellent, Kiriona.” He leans close; his eye contact is only made more intense by the way he sways, as if he’s dizzy. “Listen. Listen, listen quickly!”

“I am listening.”

“There are those who wish to open the Tomb, who believe my death rests in that cage. They will try to free her, to depose me, to destroy me, and everything I’ve built. Kiriona, they will try to use you. Do you remember what we talked about?”

She swallows, involuntary, and it makes the wound in her throat convulse unpleasantly. “You want me to kill her. Annabel.”

Her father nods once more, very slow, as though her words are coming to him from a great distance. “You must help them open the Tomb. Then we can be a family. The danger of my blood in your veins will be moot; your body can be healed, if you want it to be.”

On her back, the baby stirs and then settles again; Kiriona tries valiantly to breathe.

With intense focus, the Emperor continues: “Tomorrow, when you board the shuttle, hide as close to the engines as you can. That will help blur your thanergetic signature. Ianthe will be concentrating on navigating the River, and piloting her borrowed body. It’s your best chance of remaining undetected until you arrive in the Ur system.”

“Okay. I will.”

The nodding starts up again, in a rhythm now with the swaying—then, bizarrely, the Emperor begins to hum. His eyes slide closed in beatific concentration. After a few uncomfortable beats where Kiriona wonders if he’s gone completely round the bend, he fumbles for the plug he took out of his ear and presses it to hers. “Here, listen, you’ll like this one.”

It’s music. Or at least, she thinks it’s music—she’s only ever heard Ninth hymns. This must be the kind of music she read about in comic books, little dots and lines and people with their arms in the air. This music doesn’t seem suited to dancing, though—it has a slow rhythm with little bursts of sounds that wash over her the rising and falling of the bells, and a sorrowful voice crying out: Here in the dark, in these final hours, I will lay down my heart, and I’ll feel the power, but you won’t…no you won’t…’cause I can’t make you love me if you don’t.

“What is this?” she asks, overwhelmed, and her father smiles dreamily.

“My mum’s MP3 player. Her favorite music. I kept it for a lark. Could’ve just had the same music on my phone, you know? But it was sentimental.”

“You had a mum?”

His sharp, pained laugh cracks over the lamentation in her ear. “Yes, Kiriona. And when she went to uni, this was what she listened to. I thought it was awfully cringe when I was your age, but listening to it now…I think it was the depression. But most of them still slap.”

Kiriona’s complete bafflement must show on her face; he holds out the little oblong device. “Look, here’s how you stop it—and here’s the play button—and this one means skip ahead, and this one is skip back. Here’s the volume. This thing doesn’t even have a shuffle feature, very retro.” Then he pops the other plug out and presses the whole tangle into her hands. “Here, you should take it with you. For your trip.”

She looks at the device, and back up to her father’s eager face. The music has changed—a new song?—startling and raucous. “I…okay. Thanks.”

“I know you’ll make me proud, Kiriona,” he says. “And keep an eye on your sister. She’s a tricky one.”

***

Day Two

In the post-myriadic year of her father—the ten thousand and first year of the Resurrecting King, the sovereign Lord Over the River!—Kiriona Gaia packs her toothbrush, her boot polish, and her crown of office, and settles in to watch her baby sleep.

She put her down in the cot the night before with the false heartbeat under her head, pulled over the grave-dirt-lined mattress. She should’ve tried it sooner; the baby slept the whole night and shows no signs of stirring, even now, in the absolute darkness before the day shift running lights ease on. Kiriona, unwilling to sleep, has been listening to her father’s mum’s—to her grandmother’s music all night, watching the cot, wondering if her pocket-size charge can dream yet, wondering if she’ll even notice when Kiriona is gone. She still knows fuck all about babies; Lieutenant Arba probably takes better care of her than Kiriona does, and will certainly keep doing so until Kiriona gets back.

Assuming Kiriona makes it back.

The song in her ears switches over. She knows them all now—there are only twenty-three of them, and she’s been listening all night—and she thinks she understands what her father meant about slapping. Some of them hit her with a wall of sound, knocking the thoughts right out of her head; some of them kick her heart in the dick, or would if she still had a heart. She tries to imagine a woman who died before the birth of the universe, who did things so ancient and foreign to Kiriona that imagining them becomes impossible. But she can understand a woman who lays in bed and doesn’t sleep and listens to music and lets it coax her feelings, those most uncontrollable of electrical impulses, into something comprehensible, in the privacy between her two earplugs.

When the baby finally starts to stir, as if feeling Kiriona’s eyes on her, she gets up to ready herself for the day instead. Shoves her feet into her boots; shakes her jacket out in the sonic and hangs it over a chair. Gives her hair a fluff, and rinses her mouth with antiplaque, and grimaces through her hated once-weekly scrubbing of the jagged edges of ribs that peek out the hole in her chest, because somehow they collect old blood and soot from the pyres like nothing else.

A seeking cry from the other room, frightened. “Coming, my sweet,” she calls back, giving up on bone maintenance. They can air dry. Who cares? At the sound of her voice the baby winds up into irritation and then fury. “Okay, sunshine, I hear you, breakfast is coming…”

The routine is so familiar now that Kiriona doesn’t need much light to do it by—make up a bottle and pop it in the baby’s mouth—let her hold it herself, bossy, and she’ll hurl it to the floor when she’s done—a diaper change, and struggle on the little white socks she’ll kick off, and then her favorite romper that had seemed so hilariously big on her just a few months ago. She fills it out now, and soon enough she’ll be too big for it altogether.

Then she plops the baby on her knee—”Come on, you can sit up on your own, work that core”—and in the pre-morning calm they regard each other. “Now listen,” says Kiriona somberly, “I’ll be away for a while, and I’m not sure when I’ll be back. But I’ll bring your mum with me, if I can. The one who might actually like you, not Tridentarius. Just forget about that whole side of your family right now, they’re very fucked up. Jury’s still out on Corona I guess, if she’s alive.”

The baby, mostly ignoring her, reaches out to investigate the gleaming fragments in her chest wound instead—because of course she’s excited about bones—and Kiriona redirects her with the bunny.

“Nope, no way. Those are sharp. Play with this instead.”

With an aggravated expression, the baby tosses the bunny aside; Kiriona buttons her shirt back up to the throat, and lets the baby grab at the buttons as a compromise.

“You’re a pain, you know?”

Around them the daytime lights gradually come up to full; with the arrival of morning comes Arba, a hot coffee in her hand, the same as every morning since their arrangement began. “Be careful out there,” she says as Kiriona knots her ascot and slips into her jacket.

“No devil’s gonna mess with me,” she replies. Kisses the baby’s head, as swift and normal as any morning, then gives in to temptation and ruffles Arba’s hair. “Okay. See you soon.”

Like any other morning now, she makes for the shuttle bay. It’s barren this early—the day crew don’t come on shift for another hour and are likely all still eating breakfast—but instead of settling into the Antioch transport with her tablet to catch up on reports, she overrides the door locks on the Ziz shuttle. Makes her way back to the engine room, quiet and still for the moment, and tucks herself out of sight as best she can. And Kiriona Gaia sticks her earplugs back in her ears, turns on her grandmother’s music, and waits for her sister prince.

***

She’s in the middle of the song about picking flowers (and feelings-y things that she doesn’t want to examine too closely in the glaring light of day) when she hears the decompressive hiss of the shuttle door followed by heavy bootsteps—as if Ianthe hasn’t entirely mastered walking in Tern’s body yet. Kiriona tucks her music away and tries to picture the scene by its sounds; Ianthe Naberius arranging her bags, securing them in place. A long quiet when she’s perhaps drawing wards, because she’s paranoid as fuck, and a satisfied “There we are!” when she’s done.

Then she buckles herself into the pilot seat, flips an absurd number of switches in a haptic clatter, and the engines rumble to life.

Kiriona can’t make out much more after that; if Ianthe keeps talking to herself, it’s too quiet to pierce the droning of machinery at work. The engines of the ship are quieter than the generators on the Ninth, but that’s not saying much—those were old as dirt and made a hellish din.

She knows they’ve entered the River by the creaking of the hull and the water that suddenly splashes up around her feet; it’s cloudy, as before, and she wonders if it’s cold or if metaphysical water stays the same temperature as the air. This time she’s ready—or at least, more ready—and she breathes in slow through her nose as the water rises fast, up her thighs, her waist, her chest, her neck. As it closes over her head she blows the breath out her mouth, equally slow. She gets to five of these, under the water, before she can let go of breathing at all.

Just as she’s starting to get comfortable, a new sound tugs at the edge of her hearing, beyond the engines’ hum and rattle. It sends a stiletto of ice down the back of her neck; she closes her eyes and strains to make it out. There’s a throbbing rhythm to it that has her up on her feet a half-second before it coalesces into the rising wail of a lonely, frightened baby.

Several things happen at once.

Kiriona bursts from the engine room and finds the baby, her baby, face contorted and wet with pitiful tears, pulling herself up to sit in the box-cot she’s nearly outgrown. The baby is in the cot, and the cot is encircled in a whitish sphere like a fogged soap bubble, and baby and cot and bubble are set in the precise center of the open floor.

In the fractional moments Kiriona spends processing this discovery, Ianthe wrenches around in the pilot seat, eyes panic wide. “Don’t touch it!” she bellows, a spear of sound that pins Kiriona in place before she’s taken two steps. “The bubble is protecting her!”

“What the fuck do you think you’re doing?!” Kiriona rages in reply. “Why is she here?”

“I’m currently trying to pilot a ship through the River,” Ianthe hisses, looking from Kiriona to her instruments to the viewport and back. “Why are you here?!”

The baby is sobbing now, leaning into the edge of the cot so hard she might tip it over, her puny baby arms reaching for Kiriona. It’s impossible not to take another step closer.

“Stop moving! If you break that barrier, she’ll be crushed by the pressure.”

“But she’s crying!”

“Let her cry! And sit down, we’ll be in the Ur system in one minute, forty-eight seconds.” Ianthe flicks a switch, and the drone of the engines ticks up minutely. “Unbelievable. You are the most infuriating, meddling, idiotic—”

Kiriona ignores her; sinks to the floor just far enough from the bubble that if she’s knocked off-balance somehow, she won’t slam right into it immediately. “It’s okay, honey,” she tries, in the most soothing of the placating tones she’s developed. “You’re okay. I’m right here. Just a little longer, and then we’ll have a cuddle, yeah? You and me and your bunny? I can see her there in the cot. Careful, be careful, you’ll fall over and bonk your head. You’re so good at sitting up now! A champion!”

“—audacity to stow away on my mission! The Emperor will be furious, if he can get out of bed long enough to notice you’re missing! Who’s going to deal with the devils?”

“Shut up and drive, Tridentarius!”

“Fifty-six seconds and counting.” Ianthe kicks out a booted foot and spins the copilot’s chair around. “Come here and sit in an actual chair with a safety belt.” Then, sensing Kiriona’s hesitance: “It’s for the baby’s safety, I don’t want you toppling about if there’s turbulence on our ascent. Otherwise I would pray to our Kindly Lord for you to brain yourself on a bulkhead.”

With as much fury as she can express through body language alone, Kiriona throws herself into the chair and turns her back to the viewport to keep her eyes on the baby, who is screaming with such urgent betrayal that she’s choking for air. “Easy, easy, I can hear you, I’m right here,” Kiriona soothes, uselessly. “Not long now, I know you don’t have a concept of time, but you’ll be out of there so soon.”

“Forty-three seconds,” says Ianthe. “Belt, Gonad.”

She fumbles the buckles closed. “If you hurt Lieutenant Arba—”

“Your little friend will be fine, barely even concussed. Thirty seconds, beginning ascent.”

Kiriona continues to fume as the water creeps downward again, more slowly than it rose. “And what did you think you were gonna do? Present Harrow with the baby you manufactured without even asking her—”

“She owed me for cutting her brain open. She still owes me. She granted me the Favor of the Chain.”

“There’s no fucking way.”

“And yet it’s true. Twelve seconds to emergence.”

“You try to swipe my adept out from under my nose, and then you kidnap my kid!”

As the last of the River water burbles away and Kiriona starts tugging at the safety belt, Ianthe finally turns back to her with cutting eyes.

“She’s not yours, Kiriona,” she says. “Neither of them are.”

She reaches out, and slaps Naberius’ palm to the center of Kiriona’s forehead.

And Kiriona is Gone.

***

Day Three

the room that materializes out of the darkness this time is cramped and gracefully decrepit. you watch its slow generation like trying to focus after a blow to the head; a bed strewn with pillows makes itself known, and a chair beside it. a messy desk. a bookshelf; one of the books, pale pink on the spine, sticks out a little as if it’s been recently read. You remember it, vaguely. one of the romances Dulcinea—Cytherea—used to read aloud on the balcony while you crouched by her chair like an obedient dog.

outside the dingy window is a black void, and you find the same when you wrench open the door. you step through, and you are back in the room. you step out again, and you are stepping back in the room.

Ianthe! you bellow, enraged, terrified. If you fucking touch her—

there is no threat you can make.

you sink, like a corpse puppet with all its strings cut, into the chair. the bed is strange without a body in it, the fever-bright eyes that looked right into you, the gossamer-skinned hand that held yours. you look at the dingy floor, just as you did then, and her words float across its surface like messages wiped through dust.

somebody dies, their spirit’s free forever, even if we snatch

or use the energy

Oh, I know sometimes they come back

we can call them

the Fifth

exception to the rule shows their mastery of us

when we beg. Once someone dies, we can’t grasp at them anymore

except for one person, and he’s very far from here

I don’t feel very masterful at the moment, bitch, you tell the remnants of memory in the stone tiles of the floor.

by your commandment the tiles rattle; in a wave they flip, settle, stretching into a path of seamless steel. steel liberally splattered with gore, the stinking remnants of decimated space bees, and one enormous steaming metal cylinder—you recognize it now as the casing of a truly ludicrously-sized herald-bullet. the casing is framed by the bloody prints of two delicate bare feet, prints that fade away down the hall into blackness.

you follow them. we follow them. the dark throws up hallways around us that muddle and shift and solidify into a boring, beige little foyer and an open door to an empty sitting room and a shimmering white robe on a hook. we wedge ourself behind the robe as if there is anything here we can hide from, and the memory blurs into iridescent cloud.

This is why I didn’t want to name her, you murmur in the close air. you don’t need to explain. a bomb. a battery. a baby.

let her make her own name.

the void settles: the wall behind us, solid; the robe covering us, diaphanous; and quietly you fill the empty space beyond with music. time bends around us like water, by turns churning or stagnant and strange. we overlap and overlap until each mote of me maps onto a mote of you; i cling like so much dust.

until the wall bursts open and the River comes in.

we are sucked into the current—the water crushes us like a fist and the bones of our body, her body, begin to crumple and She is wedging herself between us and shoving at you and shoving at you and we reach for each other as the gummy-bright stuff of us snaps and tears and as it unspools i can feel him grasping you pulling you very far from me, i think—

***

Day Four

Kiriona slams back into her body with unnecessary force, jolting upright, as tightly tethered as the day her father fixed her in there. She’s in a Cohort-standard bed in a Cohort-standard barracks room, lit dimly with a single bulb in the ceiling, and Naberius Tern’s body is sitting on the bed’s edge, watching her.

“Where is she?”

Wordlessly, her sister prince points down at the floor; Kiriona leans over and sees that the box cot has been placed next to the bed, and the baby is sprawled on her back with an arm above her head, asleep. There’s a reddened, bruising lump above one eye—she did tip over and hit her head, after all.

Kiriona closes her eyes. Opens them again, and the baby is still there. When Kiriona reaches down to carefully feel, the tiny chest rises and falls steadily under her palm.

“She won’t wake for a while,” says Ianthe. “I had to sedate her.”

“Sedate her?”

“Number Seven doesn’t agree with her. I’ve put a ward on her as well, don’t rub it off.”

Kiriona stares at her. As panic recedes, she starts to take in the too-casual posture and bored tone of voice—they don’t work as well in a different body. There’s a tension to Ianthe, as though she’s trying very hard not to just leap up and go.

Go where?

“I thought that only affected necromancers.”

“It does. She’s too young to have presented aptitude, but she most certainly will.” Ianthe’s superior expression fits right in on Tern’s face. “Her pedigree aside, I can hear it in her myocardial function.”

“That’s fucked up, Ianthe. And I swear on God’s heart-patterned boxers, the next time you turn me off like that I will interrupt your myocardial function.”

“Touchy,” she says, uncrossing her legs and then crossing them the other way, then adjusting again, ankle on knee. “I’ve been quite busy taking care of things while you were napping.”

“What kinds of things?”

Her too-casual smile brightens. “Well! You and I gave an address to the people of New Rho. I’m sure they were delighted to hear from their Tower Princes.” She tips her head to one side. “Especially the local Edenite factions. You know, your resting bitch face looks even more like your mother than when you’re awake.”

Kirona glowers. “And?”

“You needn’t worry your thick head about the political details. We announced an amnesty period of twenty-four hours”—she checks her clockwork—“ah, nineteen hours now, for missing House personnel to turn themselves in. And I need you to stay right here until that window has closed.”

“Why?”

Ianthe’s mouth purses thoughtfully, engaged in some internal debate. “Because one stray sheep has already returned. Not Harrowhark,” she amends immediately, before Kiriona can even formulate words. “The prodigal Saint of Duty.”

With the barest loosening of tension, Kiriona pulls back a little from her tethers—just enough to keep her expression blank. If Gideon, first edition, really is dead…then what is Pyrrha Dve planning? “What did he say?”

“Oh, he’s been enormously helpful so far, though just as much of a creep as ever. I’ll tell you all about it once the amnesty period is over and we can get off this dreadful rock. The main thing you need to know is that he’s somehow under the impression that you’re just a corpse I’m parading about—apparently the news of your glorious heroism on Antioch hasn’t reached this far.”

“So?”

“So,” drawls Ianthe, as though this is painfully obvious, “he’s dreadfully unpredictable, and I need him to continue to cooperate with me. Given his…involvement…with your mother, I think it wise not to let this particular cat out of the bag just yet.”

“Sure, okay,” says Kiriona, and she carefully touches the weapons belted to her waist. “But how do you think you’re gonna keep me here?”

Ianthe, infuriatingly, waggles a finger at her. “Please, your attempts at intimidation are truly pathetic. I’ve warded the hallway. It’s a new design—you won’t get through it in any fit state to fight, and as for the baby…well, she’d disintegrate almost instantaneously.”

That familiar slow rage that only Ianthe can foment pulses somewhere in her chest, gongs like a bell behind her eyes. “One of these days you’re going to regret being such a grade A dickhead.”

Ianthe Naberius has the gall to throw her head back and laugh. “Oh, I don’t believe I will. But if you’re very good, sister, we might both get something we want.” She stands up from the bed, stretching, and crosses to the door. “See you in approximately nineteen hours,” she says as she leaves, and the lock clicks behind her.

***

Kiriona breathes, to settle the fury. The last of the sand has finally worked its way out of her lungs, or perhaps just been absorbed by her un-rotting tissues; slowly she ticks down from roiling to only simmering.

Ianthe thoughtfully brought along the nappy bag and deposited it next to the bare, sad standard-issue desk, so Kiriona lays the baby there on a blanket to change her and then wraps her back up in her toothy romper, careful not to smudge the spit-and-blood ward daubed across her torso. She sleeps straight through, which is disturbing—but better, maybe, than the alternative.

Trapped, at a loss, Kiriona lays the baby back down in her cot with the false heartbeat under her cheek, and then lays herself down in the bed to not-sleep, just as she’s done almost every night of the last six months, only this time with her grandmother’s music turned low in her ears.

Unexpectedly, sleep drags her under.

She is screaming, screaming, screaming, or perhaps it isn’t her and the screaming is the emaciated and furious girl locked tight but thrashing in her arms, or perhaps it’s both of them, sinking in the salt water that stings her eyes and scours her sinuses and clogs her mouth. She screams until she feels like someone else, until the girl in her arms is gone, until the mask that is her face threatens to tear in half with the force of it, let me out, let me out, LET ME OUT

***

Day Five

By the time the amnesty period is almost up, Kiriona has fed the baby four times, changed her five times, and spent quite a lot more time than usual pacing and bouncing and shushing and plying her with toys to try to distract from whatever unpleasant effect the Resurrection Beast is having. It’s a bit like the first few weeks Kiriona had her, restless and fretful and punctuated with ear-splitting and inconsolable screaming, until Ianthe finally pops back in with an eyedropper of sedative. Her sister prince rolls her eyes as Kiriona mixes it in with a bit of formula—“I just squirted some in her mouth last time, you really don’t need to go to all this trouble.”—but just as quickly leaves them be. Kiriona doesn’t bother asking what’s happening outside this room. Ianthe will tell her when she feels like it, and not a minute sooner.

At last they’re back where they started, her baroness of the witching hour asleep in the cot again, Kiriona laid out on the bed like the corpse she is. This time she risks Going Away—in reach if the baby cries, but otherwise blessedly insensate. It’s nothing like the void Ianthe keeps sending her to, but now she can sense the similarity—a matter of degree. The soft deep gray in which she floats is soothing, and soothingly nothing.

Then the tethers around her ears tremble, as if plucked; belatedly she registers the click of the door. Tentative footsteps, too light to be Ianthe. But who else could pass the ward?

She reels herself in closer; keeps herself utterly still. The baby, opposite the door and so hidden from view, doesn’t stir as the intruder creeps closer. A faint, familiar smell comes with them, the ozone of fresh necromancy and effortful sweat. Then a hand touches her hand, so lightly, and she can’t stand it anymore—she opens her eyes.

Harrowhark is standing over her.

Harrowhark, wearing an expression on her gaunt and naked face that Harrowhark has never worn, and wearing Gideon’s eyes in her face, as gold as coins.

Those eyes pin her in place as surely as God’s—they seem to read every panicked, incredulous, desperate thought flashing through her mind—and then Harrow tilts her head like a curious bird, leans down, and kisses her.

Just once. Purposeful and firm and careful, like the answer to a question. All Kiriona’s tethers shudder violently; a flash of something too hot to be agony, and then too cold, radiates down her center line and shoots to the tips of her fingers. Too utterly stunned to move, let alone speak, Gideon watches as Harrow pulls back.

Her expression shifts again. Self-conscious. Uncertain, sliding into defensive. “You looked like you wanted to be kissed, that’s all,” she says, and it’s Harrow’s voice, but so utterly not Harrow’s voice—

Footsteps—a shadow at the door. Kiriona slams her eyes shut and pulls back again, just enough to ease the overwhelm, to get the barest distance from the shocks of feeling firing off under her skin.

“Pyrrha, I’m really sorry, I messed up.”

The new footsteps, heavier than not-Harrow’s, pause just inside the door. “That’s Gideon Nav, all right,” says a new voice. Pyrrha Dve. So she was fooling Ianthe—why? “I’d know her anywhere. I wouldn’t need to be told. Talk about being the mother’s daughter.” Pyrrha’s moving again, further into the room, coming around the other side of the bed and stopping short again. “What the hell is this?”

“What’s what?” says not-Harrow.

The baby shifts in her cot, breathes out a soft, questioning sound.

This marks the end of any restraint Kiriona might have been clinging on to, of any sense that she might keep the advantage and find out what the fuck is going on. Instead she rolls up from the bed and draws her sword in one burst of motion, planting herself between the cot and the remnant cavalier, the edge of her rapier pressed hard enough to Dve’s throat to draw a trickle of blood.

“Pyrrha!” not-Harrow squeals, and Dve goes still.

“Back off,” Kiriona snarls. “You don’t touch her.”

Dve’s eyes never leave Kiriona’s as her hands slowly rise, palms out and fingers spread, the thumb tucked in on the hand that faces not-Harrow. “All right, kid. Easy. I’m going to step back.”

“Kid” rankles, but Dve does step back, calm and smooth; slowly the shallow slice on her throat seals up as not-Harrow waffles fretfully on the other side of the bed. More quiet sounds rise from the cot, a tiny, unsettled ah, ah, ah. The baby will fully wake soon, the sedative wearing off at the worst possible time, of course. Kiriona steps backward until she can touch the cot with the heel of her boot, just to feel that it’s there; she doesn’t lower her sword.

“What are you doing here? Where’s Ianthe? And what is that?” Not-Harrow looks deeply offended when Kiriona jerks her chin at her, which has the confusing effect of making her look more like Harrow than she has up to this point.

“You can put that sword away,” Dve says, unruffled. “We’re here to find you. Ianthe’s been temporarily evicted. Her name is Nona. And you’re really Gideon Nav, in there? That shithead managed to pull you out of your girl and then didn’t even bring you back all the way?”

“Shut up,” snaps Kiriona, and doesn’t sheathe her sword. “You don’t get to ask the questions here.”

“That’s not fair,” not-Harrow pipes up, scowling. Then the baby, with a sense of dramatic timing inherited on both sides of her biology, finally realizes that she’s awake and unhappy and declaims her feelings with a grizzling cry. Not-Harrow’s expression melts instantly into wide-eyed understanding and an unnervingly bright smile, as though her opinion on the current situation has instantly reversed, and she gasps in delight: “You have a baby?”

***

It’s almost impossible, Kiriona is discovering, to keep control of a potentially hostile situation in which a baby is screaming.

She hadn’t yet lowered her sword when Dve’s carefully neutral face wrinkled into a pitying frown. “Sounds like something’s hurting her. Is she teething? Nono, get that bag on the table there. Is it too heavy for you?”

“I’ve got it! Can I see the baby? Does she have tiny fingernails? What do her ears look like? I don’t mind that she’s crying. The baby who lives in our building cries all the time.”

Not-Harrow seemed perfectly unconcerned that Kiriona’s sword was still drawn as she hauled the nappy bag from the table to the bed with straining stick arms; Dve, after an assessing sidelong look at Kiriona’s ready stance, started rooting around inside. She pulled out the rattle, which not-Harrow shook experimentally, and then the loopy rubber tubing toy. “Is this a humeral head? Creative, but these toys are shit.”

“That’s not nice, Pyrrha. Beautiful Ruby says that baby things are expensive.”

Dve ignored this rebuke and looked back up at Kiriona. “You gonna pick her up sometime soon?”

And so Kiriona finds herself with weapons stowed and the baby whinging piteously in her arms, her bunny shoved in her mouth, as Dve repacks the bag with military efficiency.

“You know, some explanations would be great,” growls Kiriona, bouncing the baby with little hope of improvement. “Any time now.”

“I’m not explaining it all twice,” Dve grunts, shouldering the nappy bag. “Does that cot fold up? Hand it here. Let’s go, Sextus will want to talk to you.”

A fine shiver thrills through all her tethers like a warning. “He’s dead.”

Dve smiles, rakish. “Aren’t we all?”

So Kiriona follows this unsettling pair—Dve has a point, it’s not like she’s anything approaching normal—toward the promise of, at the very least, freedom from the room she’s been trapped in, and takes the opportunity to study not-Harrow. It smarts, to look at her. Like touching a hot surface over and over to see if it’s cooled. It’s so clearly Harrow’s meat—Gideon’s been inside it, she should know—and the black clothes and shorn head are equally clearly a disguise. Not-Harrow keeps reaching for hair to tug on or tuck behind her ears, and finding none to fidget with.

And she looks like absolute garbage, which is saying something. In the hallway Dve coaxes some kind of nutrient bar into her hands, cajoles her into a few bites; then, when she stumbles going up the stairs, Dve lifts her bodily in a princess carry that sets Kiriona’s teeth grinding. Never once in her life has Harrowhark Nonagesimus been grateful to be carried, nor lay her head with such ease on a rescuer’s shoulder.

Yet, there’s something about her—a sensation that’s not quite a pull, and not quite a sound, but some synaesthetic combination of the two that makes her…familiar. Longed-for, and simultaneously repulsive. Kiriona’s tethers are so tense they vibrate, as if she might be launched out of her body at any moment, or pulled in so fast and tight she’d spontaneously resurrect.

At least moving around helps keep the baby calm. One of them should have their shit together.

It’s in this state of mind that she follows Dve to an impractically large room absolutely chocka with abandoned corpse puppets, two empty chairs Ianthe clearly set up as thrones, and a cluster of familiar faces ranging from hmm to the fuck? levels of unexpected. She’s pulled up short, trying to take stock: Judith Deuteros, laid out on the floor looking more than half dead—which is pretty good, considering Gideon had assumed she was fully dead—with her head cushioned on the very much living thigh of Coronabeth Tridentarius. Camilla Hect, looking grim and sweaty, wrapped around the middle with bandages that are already leaking blood. And propping her carefully upright, the body of Naberius Tern—which turns to Kiriona, as they all do, with a stunned expression and surprisingly deep, cool gray-brown eyes.

“Yo,” says Kiriona, like tossing a grenade into the burgeoning silence. “Princess. Cam. Sex Pal. What’d you do with Ianthe?”

Palamedes, much more graceless in Tern’s body than Ianthe was and still looking baffled, taps his head. “Locked her out, for a while.”

“Huh. Taste of her own fucking medicine.”

“That’s one swear,” murmurs not-Harrow, and Dve readjusts her weight a little.

Palamedes tries to push his glasses up his nose, and frowns when there’s nothing there. “I can see there are some explanations to be given all around,” he says, and then his mouth tips up into a cautious smile. “But welcome back, Gideon.”

“Let’s start with, ‘that’s not my name anymore,’” says Kiriona, and now even Dve turns to stare. “I’m Prince Kiriona Gaia the First, Her Celestial Highness, First Lieutenant of the Cohort, Emperor’s Life Guards, non-auxiliary—honorary title because Dad’s into nepotism—heir to the Necrolord Prime, first of the Tower Princes.” The baby squirms unhappily, and Kiriona shifts her to the other hip. “And the Imperial Princess here needs a new nappy, so I’ll take my bag back now.”

***

Kiriona Gaia hasn’t felt so many things in such rapid succession since she woke up as Kiriona Gaia. She can’t even identify them all. A mucky, sticky hurt every time she looks at not-Harrow. A cautious pang to discover the Sixth were trying to safeguard her—her body, before she’d been back in it, and her soul, when they thought it might be in their care—and hot flares of confused betrayal when they tell her who they’re working with, and what they’re planning. Not one person in the room trusts her father, God, their Emperor, and she has to privately admit that’s fair. She knows now what the Cohort does on shepherd planets. What her comic books glossed over. It’s a fucked system—but it’s the system they have, and now she’s at the top of it.

Which means not one person in the room completely trusts her, either. That stings, like the pricking of needles into what’s left of her soft insides, even though it shouldn’t. But every time Sextus calls her Gideon with that patient sadness, like he’s waiting for her to catch up to what he already knows, she wants to whack him one in Tern’s stupid face. He presses her on her plans, on her allegiance, on her motives, on her eagerness to tag along to the Ninth, and she evades, and she jokes, and she outright lies.

But he doesn’t press her on the baby. He only says, “I’d suggest you play dead to make things easier with We Suffer, but there’s no hiding an infant suffering hive exposure. We might as well try some transparency.”

“Let me talk to her first,” says Corona. “She’ll see sense.”

So it’s the apostate Crown Princess of Ida, stealing Kiriona’s thing and going by some other name, who charms, commands, and straight up bullies her commander and the rest of her BoE wing into accepting that yes, this is a thing that’s happening. God’s undead minion daughter walks among them with her zombie baby, and any whiff of threat toward that baby will be swiftly met with violence. “Don’t worry,” says Corona—Crown—brightly as Edenite medics work over Camilla and some more poke at Deuteros. “They got used to Nona.” Then, inexplicably: “Though I don’t imagine a bag over your head would stop you. Here, let’s get something for the little one, I hate to see her suffering.” At her urging, one of the medics measures out an infant dose of more sedative; then Crown herds Kiriona, the baby, the nappy bag, and the box cot to the back of a BoE truck. The soldier who hops out to pull down the ramp—a machete strapped to each thigh, which Kiriona can grudgingly respect—takes one look at her and blanches.

“Lieutenant—” Crown starts, coolly.

The Edenite throws up their hands and lets the ramp slam to the ground; declares “Oh, fuck no” in the loudest and most irritating voice possible, and abandons the truck altogether to stomp away.

Crown ushers Kiriona and the now-shrieking baby up the ramp. “Forget her, she’s a prick. Here’s the sedative. Anything else you need for her?”

“Water?” Kiriona says, bouncing uselessly as the baby’s wailing echoes around the giant tin can. “For a bottle.”

Crown smiles, the kind of stunning smile that stops traffic and gives Kiriona the insane urge to admit this is your niece! “Of course. Sit tight.”

In the time it takes Kiriona to dig out a clean bottle and the formula powder and a burp cloth and to wrestle her heartbeat singlet out of the cot, the water has arrived—as have the Sixth.

“Oh dear,” says Palamedes, when faced with the racket at close range. “Do you need some help?”

Then he fumbles the water bottle trying to pass it to her without letting go of Camilla, and Kiriona raises an eyebrow.

“All right, I’m perhaps not much help in this situation. Camilla’s going to ride with you, if that’s all right. Here, Cam, let me—” With much huffing of breath he fumbles her into a seat across the way, struggling with the safety belt and the clearly still-bleeding wound.

“The belt will just aggravate it.”

“And a good sharp turn will send you flying, you won’t keep your balance like this.”

“Just put her next to me,” Kiriona snaps, shaking up the sedative-laced formula with more force than necessary.

One of those insular, communicative looks passes between them; then Cam heaves herself upright and crosses the truck to take the seat beside Kiriona, with Palamedes trailing after.

“Ah,” he says, nosing around in Kiriona’s belongings to cover his general reluctance. “So this is the unusual signature I’ve been sensing.” He picks up the false heartbeat, turns it over in his hands and holds it to his ear with an admiring look. “Fascinating. Ianthe’s work?”

“Yop. Helps with the sprog.” The sprog, reduced to pathetic hiccuping, takes hold of her bottle the moment Kiriona offers it.

“Of course, of course. Recreating womblike conditions.”

“I should’ve put it on when I had the chance. She might sleep again, with the drugs.”

Camilla sighs heavily. “Give her here and put it on now, before we get moving.”

They watch Kiriona as she considers this—Hect with clear pale eyes, Sextus with deep gray-brown. Whatever soul fuckery they’ve been up to since Canaan House, it’s telling on them there. The baby, momentarily mollified, seems to consider Cam’s outstretched hands as well. Leans back into the safety of Kiriona’s hold, and then leans forward, curious. “Sure. Thanks,” Kiriona says finally, and passes her over.

The baby returns the matched stares that now focus on her with equal attention, sucking away at her bottle, dark eyes wide. Sextus grins, and waggles his fingers at her mostly successfully. Kiriona takes the opportunity to shoulder out of her jacket and tug off her scarf.

She’s on to her shirt buttons when Palamedes laughs, pointing at the sudden deep furrow of the baby’s brows. “That’s just the look I was trying to teach Nona! Gideon, is she—”

He looks back at Kiriona and stills. The kind of still, she knows from experience, that means he’s suddenly thinking too hard to deal with fine motor control. His eyes flick from the bloodless hole now visible in her throat to the bloodless hole revealed in her chest, and something like pity flashes across his face.

It surprises her, how much she hates that.

“Do you mind?” she snaps, and he takes hold of Tern’s body again and whirls away.

“Yes! Sorry. Pardon.” There’s a tense pause as she undoes the rest of the buttons and shrugs the shirt off. Then: “Did…ah…”

“They’re my speed holes,” she says, nonsensically, tugging the heartbeat vest over her head and hustling back into her clothes. “And no, you can’t touch them.”

She doesn’t need to see his face to know she’s caught him out. “I wouldn’t—no, of course not.”

“Necromancers,” she mutters, and beside her, Cam huffs a laugh.

***

“I think she’s out,” Cam murmurs later, over the rumble of the truck’s engine and the heavy tires on the road.

It’s just the two of them now, and the baby, and a driver somewhere up front on the other side of a partition. It’s not the smoothest ride she’s ever taken. But gingerly she lays the baby down in her cot, bunny clutched in one fist.

“That thing really needs a wash. It can’t be sanitary at this point.”

“Yeah, well, you try getting it off her.” Kiriona settles back in her seat, the cot secure between her boots; Camilla braces herself lightly against Kiriona’s side.

“So, Ninth,” she says.

“I swear to my dad, Hect, if you ask me how I am—”

Camilla is still a pill. “How are you?”

“Just swell. Taking care of a baby at age nineteen.”

A quiet snort. “It does have a lowering effect on the ego.”

“That’s one way of putting it.”

“But you care about her.”

It’s not a question. Kiriona keeps looking down at the baby, her cheeks flushed with sleep and so much crying, and can feel Cam’s eyes on her. “Yeah.” Then, when Cam doesn’t say anything else: “You can ask.”

“I don’t have to ask.”

Now Kiriona does look at her, surprised. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

Cam raises an eyebrow at her. “She’s affected by Varun’s proximity, so she’ll obviously be a necromancer. Early signs are more common in babies with necromancy on both sides—you haven’t got any, and you’re dead, besides. You’ve apparently been spending time with Ianthe Tridentarius, an extremely powerful necromancer, certainly capable of working a vat womb. Six months old plus nine months average gestation puts the baby’s conception sometime shortly after Canaan House—somewhere around the time Tridentarius assisted Nonagesimus in self-directed brain surgery, and had access to her body while she was unconscious.”

This might have been the most Kiriona had ever heard Camilla say in one go. “How do you know about that?”

“I needed her help to get the Warden back. I figured out how to get to her, but she didn’t seem to remember me. Then she handed me a letter explaining why.”

A sudden sense-memory hits: the thick flimsy envelope, the bulk of her sunglasses inside. The torn-off strip of a message tucked around the wire and glass. One flesh, one end. “Yeah,” says Kiriona, dredging up her voice from the hollow drum that is her chest. “She fucked herself up good, just to be rid of me.”

“When I read the letter,” Camilla says, studying Kiriona with blank scrutiny, “I thought that she and I were surprisingly alike.” Then she looks back down at the baby. “Also, it’s obvious just looking at her. Except the nose.”

“Yeah.” Kiriona tips her head back to stare at the truck roof; breathes deeply. “Hey. Does the Sixth House have music?”

A beat. “Some. Why?”

From the inside pocket of her jacket, Kiriona produces the music player, and passes one earplug to Cam. “Here, check this out.”

***

It’s the end of the world—this world, at least—so Kiriona might as well be sitting in the back of a truck with a tormented baby nearing the end of her sedative’s efficacy, the leftover cavalier who rooted her dead mum, and not-Harrow-probably-ice-princess-Annabel looking like death walking, watching the first two people she ever thought of as friends do…she doesn’t fucking know what, exactly, but the small assembly around them has the solemn and expectant vibe of Ninth last rites. But the Sixth always have some backup plan—something up their dull gray sleeves, a dagger in the boot. She’s almost excited to see how they’ll get out of this one.

Then Camilla folds herself down facing Tern’s body, and the way she moves has her death in it. The way she draws her knife has her death in it. And Palamedes is already dead.

Kiriona looks down at the baby, groggy and restless, tucked against her chest. Looks away, at the side of the truck, as though anything there could be interesting, and tries to afford the Sixth the moment she now realizes, foolishly late, that they’re having. She remembers. That one instant of peace, knowing there was no escape. She could say what she meant, take one last leap of faith, and it would be over.

But it’s never over, is it?

The fire, a white-hot eruption, yanks her eyes back; inside it, Camilla’s body writhes and blackens. Inside it, Gideon can see the supernova of Palamedes, exploding from the sickroom, just far enough from where he’d pinned her that she had time to get away. Inside it, Gideon can see the darting shadow of Camilla in the bright atrium of Canaan, the gleam of her knives as she fell on the Lyctor with heart broken and full fury unleashed.

She doesn’t see Harrow. That memory’s just an empty space, for her, those moments between the fence rising up and then lifting her sword with Harrow’s arms, with Harrow, the only place in this awful, merciless universe she ever wanted to be.

When the conflagration dies out, all that’s left is a person. Whole and huddled and very much in the altogether. Kiriona fumbles one-handed with the buttons of her jacket, but the Edenite commander gets there first; trousers come from a woman with Cam’s face, a forbiddingly neutral expression, and fantastic hair.

Sitting slumped and lost on the step beside her, not-Harrow crumples her face up and wails—and that’s a sound Gideon does remember. She gets up, and walks away, and walks, and walks.

She doesn’t stop until Corona comes jogging after her, to chivvy Kiriona and the baby into the cockpit of a megatruck.

***

The ride through the River is an absolute shitshow, and Kiriona is forced to admit that maybe she still doesn’t fully grasp what’s going on—because Deuteros starts screaming nonsense, and then not-Harrow opens her mouth and something emerges that almost instantly knocks out every adept in the truck. The baby goes so limp in her arms that for one black hole of a moment, Kiriona thinks—but she’s breathing. That’s good. Her heart is beating, fluttery and fast. Also good. There’s a trickle of blood coming out of her ear, and another out of her nose, and by the time Kiriona’s able to unfreeze herself from the tether-scrambling panic this induces, they’ve skidded to a stop in almost total darkness.

“Headlights,” someone was saying. “Get the headlights.”

Then Dve: “We’ve equalized. We’re on level ground.”

But the dim glow of the megatruck’s controls is all she needs to know where they are—and to know it can wait. She flails out a hand, catches Paul’s wrist. Grips it tight, because she can’t get her voice operational, until Paul crouches close. They lay a palm against the baby’s soft skull; another over her chest.

“She’s all right,” they say, as if this was never in question and hadn’t knocked Kiriona’s carefully balanced bodily functions completely sideways with fear. Methodically they dab the blood away with the cuff of their borrowed coat. “Let her wake up on her own time, she’s had a shock.”

“Yeah, no shit, Sixth.”

They flash her a smile, as if she’s been especially clever, and move on.

By the time she’s wrapped the baby, her bunny, and an extra diaper into the sling and affixed them all to her back, the door of the truck is open and the Ninth air wafts in and smacks her in the face. She knows it’s frigid, though she can’t quite feel it; but she can smell it, grit and bone and mold and incense. Exactly as she left it.

Except—something isn’t quite right.

When she steps down onto the landing field, Dve is already there with not-Harrow cradled in her arms, turning in a slow circle. “This wasn’t here back in my day,” she says. “Used to have to dock at the installation above, and take the elevator down.”

It’s something about the stillness. She can’t hear any movement on the tiers below. No skeletons; no shuffling penitents. But her tethers are all trembling in warning anyway, and she strides past Dve and into the familiar dark, trying to pinpoint the source.

“Gideon?” calls Paul, jogging up to join them. “Where are we?”

“Top tier,” she replies. “Shut up a second.”

They do. Then, fucking Dve: “I don’t hear anything.”

“Nor I.”

“Yeah, and that’s weird,” Kiriona snaps. “Have neither of you ever read a comic book?” They look at each other, and then back at her, both of them with eyes blown wide, struggling to take in the dark. Kiriona sighs. “Come on.”

***

“They killed you,” says her teacher, touching the dead chill of her cheek in a way that, from anyone who’d never struck her full in the face on a weekly basis, might be construed as tender. In the morass of this unspeakably shit day, that is the only good thing. Gideon is swept with a sizzling wash of relief; Kiriona recoils, struck with a starburst of fragmenting sorrow.

Aiglamene also recoils, and so it’s easy to see in her face when her eye lights on the baby. There can’t be more than a sliver of nose and mouth and closed eye visible; she hasn’t stirred, and is hooded and wrapped against the cold, her quick baby breaths puffing steadily against the back of Kiriona’s neck. But Aiglamene’s customary scowl deepens. She looks to not-Harrow with an expression of disappointment and betrayal so profound as to loose the bowels, if either Harrow’s body or Kiriona’s body were in a functional state.

“I know you think you’ve connected two dots,” says Kiriona, heading her off, “but you haven’t connected shit. Every single part of this is more complicated than it should be.”

Aiglamene’s one icy eye fixes on her. “I’d beat you to the River and back if we had time for any of it. As it stands, you’d better come in.”

***

In what passes for calm before the next inevitable tempest, Kiriona crouches alone in the glow of a heater. Her dark and tiny mistress has begun to rouse—just little dreaming twitches of her swaddled limbs—and her other dark and slightly less tiny…something…is off in another corner, being warmed and fussed over by her grave-faced caretakers. That’s no concern of hers, not really. Taking stock of her overtaxed and muddled feelings, she locates a crumb of gratitude that Harrowhark’s body has received some care—more than she’d been able to give it, when she was in it, and more than her own body has ever received. But Kiriona’s mission won’t really begin until Harrow’s soul is back in there, and she can get a clear shot at the popsicle bitch in the Tomb.

And then—well, Harrow will do what she wants. She always has. But she’ll be alive, and the baby will be alive, and God will become man, and there’s no point in thinking about anything beyond that.

“If that child is even half the menace you were, then I’ll die happy in the knowledge that there is still justice in this world.”

“As long as you promise to die, old woman.”

Above her, Aiglamene huffs; bends with some effort to get a closer look. “She’s awake. Emperor’s bones, she’s the spitting image.” Then, searchingly, “Not like you at all.”

“Yeah, well. She’s not mine. I mean, she is, but. Not like that.”

“Hmph. She is yours and she isn’t yours. The Reverend Daughter is herself and isn’t herself. You’re murdered and yet here plaguing me, demanding to bring strangers to our holiest of holies. These things used to be more straightforward.”

Kiriona shifts her weight. “Sure. When two people love each other very much, they engineer a genocide, and nine months later…”

“She told you.”

“Yeah. And you knew?”

Aiglamene straightens. “Of course I knew. Only a complete ninny would believe it was the flu.”

“How I’ve missed your tender words of praise.” On her back, the baby makes a drowsy, questioning little coo. “Look, sweet thing,” she says in her most sugared tones. “That’s your great-auntie Nene.”

“Nav,” Aiglamene warns, but there’s something a bit pleased in her scowl, akin to the first time Gideon managed a proper block with her two-hander without immediately falling over. “Why doesn’t she have a name?”

“I’m still deciding. Seriously considering Doombringer, what do you think?”

The old swordswoman just knocks her in the shoulder with that wicked black pike she’s been bracing on—but less viciously than she might have, once.

Then a shift in the movement of the room catches her attention, and Dve is there looking shattered with not-Harrow curled limply in her arms. “We don’t have much time. Let’s go.”

***

When Harrow was ten, when Gideon was eleven, she’d followed Harrow to this cavernous room behind the outer door. Watched in terrified fascination as Harrow’s constructs hastened the rock aside, and their mistress slipped away into the blackness of the Tomb. She was so thrilled to have a new weapon in their childhood wars.

Somehow her weapons have always done more damage than she intended.

Aiglamene leads them into the cavern, carrying no light, and the floor…gives, in a way it shouldn’t. As if the rock under their feet has melted away to jelly.

Under the squelching and startled sounds, Kiriona catches an indrawn breath; then the brief, bright glow of the tip of a cigarette.

Unbelievable.

A lamp clicks on, and standing over it, leaking smoke from her nose and studying the mismatched party assembled, stands her sister prince.

“Finally!” she says brightly. “You all kept me waiting so long, I thought you’d stood me up. No, don’t bother trying to move, that’s my own recipe. Adipose fat and mucous membrane.”

Intense disgust overcomes any other emotion Kiriona might be having. “Ugh, gross, Ianthe! And have you been fucking smoking in here the whole time? Because there’s like, a million fire detectors.”

Ianthe takes another deep drag. “I got bored. But all right.” She stubs the cigarette out on her flesh palm, because she’s an absolute freak, and tosses the crumpled butt over her shoulder. “As curious as I am about what all of you have going on,” she says with a vague wave of her hand, “I’m really only here to pick up my sister.”

Harrow’s body in Dve’s arms has begun to tremble. They’re wasting time.

“Go round her up, then,” says Kiriona. “She’s upstairs.”

Ianthe brightens further, the most genuine of her evil smiles lighting her face. “Is she! Goodness, it’s like she wants me to catch her, that unmoisturized whore.” Then she steps across the field of yellowy fat. “No, I meant you, Kiriona.”

And she grasps Kiriona by the forearm and tugs her up out of the muck. Leans in even closer—too close—and touches her bone hand to Kiriona’s chest. “You’re wearing my gift again,” she murmurs.

Across the yellow field, not-Harrow’s eyes are wide and deeply amber when she shouts, “They’re wearing friendship bracelets!”

“Yes,” Ianthe grins. “You’re very astute, imitation-flavor Harrowhark.” With a flick of her hand, the horrible fat slurps up and winds around not-Harrow—tugs her right out of Dve’s arms and props her up so Ianthe can address her. “You see, we are God’s Princes Over the Tower. And of course, I mustn’t forget my little princess.” Her bone hand trails up over Kiriona’s shoulder, to touch the baby’s cheek; at the cold, the baby murmurs in groggy unhappiness. “You’ve taken such good care of her for me.”

Before Kiriona can think this through—because when has she ever thought anything through?—she grips Ianthe’s gold-shod wrist bones so tight they spark where they grind together. “She isn’t yours.”

“Let’s not argue semantics. What matters is that she and you and I get back home. We’ll pick up Corona on the way—you two always got on, didn’t you?—and we’ll make it back to Daddy before he goes completely to pieces without us.”

Ianthe is standing so close, now. Murmuring low, just for Kiriona, flesh hand curled around her forearm, gold wrist placidly still in Kiriona’s fist. In a flash of panic, she thinks Ianthe might kiss her again, right here in front of Aiglamene, in front of Crux. In front of Harrow’s possessed body, which might be worst of all. “What about Harrow? You said if she was here, you’d get her back. You promised.”

“Oh,” says Ianthe softly, the barest flash of pain across her face. This near, her breath smells like browning apples. “I have rustled your jimmies. I said I’d find her, and I have done. But this is where the game ends. We can’t allow them to open the Tomb; we have to let her go.”

“No.”

“Stubbornness is not your most endearing quality.” Ianthe’s flesh hand slides further up her arm; her thumb tucks familiarly into Kiriona’s elbow. “But think of it. John, with us to advise him? We’ll control the universe…and my daughter will be heir to the Third.”

Kiriona’s eyes flick back to not-Harrow. To Dve, still stone-faced, a waiting readiness in her stance. But Paul, beside her, is watching Kiriona intently. They raise one hand, slow, and give a minute, sharp push outward.

The Sixth were always bossy. But they always had a plan.

“No,” says Kiriona again, low and calm. “You didn’t want her, Ianthe. Once you turn your back on something, you can’t act as though you own it. She’ll be the heir to the First, when my father is gone.”

Ianthe barks a laugh, right in her face, and Kiriona shoves her back. Draws her sword, smooth and steady. The laughter drops, replaced with shock. Behind her even the yellow fat around not-Harrow melts back into the mass on the floor, and Harrow’s body drops in a disorganized muddle of limbs. “Gonad. He’s God. He’s immortal.”

“Not if I open the Tomb, and kill what’s inside,” she snaps, slipping her off hand into the knuckle knives.

“You can’t.”

Kiriona’s patience is slipping away like so much sand. “He asked me to! He wants a mortal life, with me, with the baby!”

Ianthe’s sword unsheathes with a slick sheen. “You pathetic, love-starved child!” she shouts, wild-eyed. “He’s lying! If he sent you here to open the Tomb, then he wants his beloved monster back! He knows you can’t kill her—and he doesn’t care. He doesn’t love you, Kiriona, he loves her!”

This pierces Kiriona as neatly as three spiked fence posts—and then Harrow’s body rends open also, fountaining blood in terrifying quantity.

Weapons forgotten—everything forgotten—Kiriona squelches to her knees beside Harrow.

So does Ianthe.

“Her neck, get her neck,” Kiriona yelps, frantic, pressing her hands to the gushing wound in Harrow’s chest. Lyctoral necromancy crackles under Ianthe’s hands, sealing up the throat, the abdomen, shoving Kiriona’s hands aside to attend the rupturing heart.

Harrow is looking at the ceiling, blank and dazed; in her proximity, Kiriona’s tethers are pulling and twisting and reaching, and she curls a blood-soaked hand along the ashen cheek. “Keep it together,” she pleads, as fervent a prayer as any ever spoken at the door of the Tomb. “Wherever you are, honey, I know you can hear me. Keep it together. I’m coming for you.”

Then Paul, above the din: “Pyrrha, go.”

A thunderous gunshot. Ianthe crumples—jerks—frothing with Herald fear, she begins to scream.

On Kiriona’s back, the baby sucks in a startled breath and starts screaming with her.

***

i can hear you.

and i can hear her, too, calling me. like gravity, she and you are near me now, at last.

i can feel your hand.

your—my—our hands, against her throat. her fingers digging furrows in our face.

her throat, her fingernails, are mine now, and all the strings between us dripping red and stretched as fine as spider silk.

but i can hear you, and i can hear her too.

come and find me.