I’d just blinded one when the two-hander got seized in a pair of mandibles—you didn’t have the strength for me to tug it clear—and more were crowding the doorway. I was swearing, and yanking, and a skull mouth snapped in close to the hilt and the guard. I didn’t pull back. You weren’t wearing gloves. And it bit your damn thumb off.

Again, let me say: sorry. It was not my thumb to let them bite off. I admit completely that this was my bad, but these motherfuckers had a hunger that only thumbs could satisfy. It didn’t matter—I was yelling, and trying to grab the damn sword away anyway, and I saw it eat your thumb—these details are important, so keep up with me—and your thumb was back in the next half minute. I watched it grow. The gushing stump grew a full bone, and then the meat grew up around it in the next breath, and then it all closed over in fresh skin and thumbnail. I set it back around the hilt and it worked like it had not just been chewed up by a wasp ghoul.

So I braced us in the doorway and kept going. The best place to aim was at the junctures of bodies—thorax and abdomen—as the plates over their midsections were tough as steel. Some of the wasps who were all arms on the bottom liked to come at us with ramming speed: I sawed them through. Others had four legs, and they liked to jump, so I swept their feet off when they leapt. I had to kill the one that ate your thumb by staving in its skull with the butt of my pommel, over and over, until it stopped moving.

Once I thought I’d cleared out the wave coming for us in the bathroom, I left the doorframe—and we died the third time. One of the monsters had been waiting, and it reared up to try to drive that stinger into your brain, but I half-dodged and it just smashed your head against the wall.

Harrow, I heard it. It fractured your fucking skull. I was so terrified. I was undergoing the kind of shit that I had only undergone once in the happy knowledge that it was all going to be over soon. Child, that bee smashed you. A skull should not have made those sounds. The sound of it un-smashing was even worse—like an egg blowing back out again—but as it was saving your only skull, it was music to my ears. I cleaved that bee open from the thorax down, and it disgorged huge amounts of reeking guts and bones and green blood all over me and the carpet.

At the end, we were left in a sea of dead space bees, and you were impossibly okay. Your arms didn’t even hurt, not anymore. You didn’t have your original thumb and I’d touched your intestines, which is usually what, fourth date, but you were fine.

* * *

It was now obvious that the station was crawling with those things. You were gone, and I did not know where the fuck you were. Our only real options were to stay and fight, or go and fight: the place wasn’t getting any less filled up with wasps. And it was hotter all the time, especially in that room with the steaming piles of revenant bees.

You didn’t have any gloves. You didn’t have any armour. When I took off your robe, which was just puke rags by then, I found you were wearing a whole bunch of bones on your skin for no apparent reason. I was sorry to take them off in case they were any use at all, but whatever necromantic noise you’d used to fix them to yourself wasn’t working, and they were making it even harder to extend your arms. So I closed my eyes and I reached under your shirt and I peeled them all off, and I tied your hair back and took your sword and left. I didn’t look, and I barely touched you. Don’t get mad.

There were other sounds echoing down the halls by then. I know the clash of swords on bone when I hear it. There was that huge, murmurous buzzing of invading Heralds, and there were more of those baying, bleating screeches, but there was also the absolutely fucking unmistakable sound of rapier work. The alarm cawed overhead. I didn’t run, but I legged it pretty quickly down the corridor, and then, beneath the alarm, I became aware of yet another sound: someone was screaming.

In a fork off the hallway, I found the source. Dead Heralds lay in an untidy semicircle around the last living, rearing member of their gang, and fighting this bee—screaming her head off—was Lemon-mouth Prime: the Lyctor you called Mercymorn.

She was shrieking, drunk and howling off pure fright, every so often lunging in the wrong direction as though she couldn’t see straight. I came into the room, not knowing what to do, not knowing how to help her. Despite the screaming, she was holding her own—her rapier was a steel needle flashing in and out, out of the way of the snapping jaws of the Herald, thrusting into the black eye socket in a shower of jelly. There were long, shining folds of a net wrapped around her offhand arm, but the net was not in her hand. She missed a thrust, nothing but wing, and then she drove herself into the Herald and laid that bare hand on its skull. And the Herald just kind of imploded.

The skull disappeared into dust, the thorax collapsed in on itself like a pricked balloon, and the insides blew out the back almost delicately. It slumped, and when it went still the Lyctor stopped screaming. There were thin runnels of blood coming off her face and I thought she’d been hurt, but then I realised they were coming out of her eyes like tears. She stood there with her shoulders heaving and her hand pressed over her face, pinky-reddish hair coming out of her braid, looking unhurt but pretty sorry for herself.

And she looked right at us, before I could duck back into the corridor.

The Lyctor called Mercymorn stared at your face, and I have never seen anyone so totally shocked by misery. It wasn’t just fear: it was this huge, grief-stricken panic, a welter of unhappy terror. It was the face of someone who had just seen their one true love drop-kicked into a meat grinder and come out the other end as a pile of sausages.

“So now you come to me, First,” she said raggedly. “Now you come … at the end of everything.”

She seemed to be waiting. I didn’t know what to say. No way I could pretend to be you; I knew you too well. As we both waited in idiot silence, her fear changed—her eyes narrowed—her mouth hardened from its softer line of anticipatory terror, and she said, “No,” and then, “No,” again. And she was so old, Harrow, I don’t know how you dealt with all these unbelievably old bastards—she was old like Cytherea was old, and her eyes were absolutely abominable. They made my skin crawl. When she looked at us, it was like she could see right through me, and she was seeing shit I hadn’t even heard of.

The Lyctor said: “You haven’t come, have you? You’re not her. That freak would have gone for me already … she never could act human. But you stand like a human—you gawp like a human—you are human,” she said, with a rising horrified disgust. “But I don’t understand! Harrowhark was meant to be eaten by now! She wouldn’t have died for hours, and the Heralds are everywhere!”

“Lady,” I said, “are you telling me you stabbed my necromancer?”

“Yes, and she should have thanked me for it!!” said the Lyctor, thoroughly distracted. “It wasn’t horrible—I dulled her nerves, out of a misplaced sense of affection—I put her out in the corridor specially so she would be eaten quicker, and once she started getting eaten alive, she would have been mad and not feeling a thing! But you’re the soul—the soul of the cavalier that she stuffed in the back of her brain! What happened to your eyes?”

“Let’s go to a better question,” I said, and I raised my sword in your hands. “You know we already killed one Lyctor, right? Me and Harrow? You know we’ve practised?”

“Oh, shut up, Harrow’s cavalier,” she said hysterically. “I’m trying to think. You’re not her—she isn’t driving you—but you have her eyes. Why? When they showed me your corpse I didn’t think to check the eyes. Stupid, Mercy. Oversight. I thought I knew what you were, though I didn’t want to believe it…”

I said, “What the fuck are you talking about?”

“I am talking about the failure of the Ninth House operation,” she said.

And she cocked her flower-coloured head to the side so that her sweaty hair fell over her face, in that sizzling, gulping heat, and she stared at us, and she said in tones that were almost sedate: “I thought the commander had simply been a bad girl … a workaholic, putting business before family. She was the type … but that would have been too much of a coincidence. Let me think. Let me think. I made her the dolls—they were perfect—and then she must have played silly buggers with—with the emission,” she said, suddenly, impassioned. “Of course it killed her! She was always arrogant! That moron knew Gideon was on her tail!”