Something in your head went spang when we heard my name. It sounded strangely gloopy at first, unreal, as though we were underwater. But then the pain went away.

The Lyctor continued, those weird reddish-haze eyes scrunched up as though she might cry: “And then Gideon ruined everything,” she said. “Then the commander ruined everything. Then you ruined everything. This could have been over eighteen years ago. But now it’s messy … now I have to take the River all the way home and fight my way through Anastasia’s horrid tomb cult just because the commander always thought she was so smart. Don’t know why Gideon was so obsessed with her … he never cared about beauty, and she was repellent to talk to.”

I did not know what the fuck to say to this incoherent spew. She said, ragged, peevish: “What? No tongue in your head, you—you mutant, you mistake, you great big calf-eyed fuck-up? I need to think. I need to think. Why are those eyes now in your face? Unless…”

And then, of all goddamn things, her voice caught in a great, shuddery sob. She paced backward and forward. At one point, she threw her head back as though she were going to yell aloud, and that weird-hued hair shivered over her back. But she said nothing, just stood in the pit of the light, and then she turned back to us.

When she spoke at last, she sounded frozen and numb. “I see. I understand. Lipochrome. Recessive. You are the evidence. He lied to us … and you are all the proof I needed. I don’t have to breach anything. I don’t have to go back.” She exhaled. “Good God … Cytherea would have known as soon as she looked at you.”

And I said: “What the fuck are you talking about? What the hell are you talking about? What other Gideon?”

“The Lyctor sent to kill your mother,” said Mercymorn.

“But Harrow’s mother—”

“I’m not talking to Harrowhark, you facile dead child,” she said disdainfully. “I am talking to you … Nav … Gideon Nav … Gideon! What a laugh … you abomination, you heresy, you failed ambition nineteen years too late.”

I’m sorry, Nonagesimus. I didn’t know what to do. Maybe I should’ve turned and gotten the hell out of there, holed up somewhere to wait until you came back. But I said: “What—about—my mother?”

“Excuse me. I am wrong. I should not use that term,” said the necromantic saint. She rolled both her shoulders back and wiped those thin dilute tears of blood off her cheeks. “How she would have hated the word mother.”

And she raised her rapier, and she slowly unwound that net from her wrist, and it fell to the floor in great billowy shining knots. Mercy said: “Now I will clean up my mistakes. Cristabel always said I was tidy.”

She darted forward with her rapier close to her body, the net trailing behind—fuck, she was quick—knocked away my sluggish counter, easily a second too late, and she stabbed us neatly through the heart. An easy thrust, with enormous strength behind it, straight past the right breastbone and right to the very centre of your heart, which had been fucked up one too many times in my keeping. It was a surgical, exact thrust. Her rapier was a slender needle, and if you’d carved us open you probably would have found that the slim blade had gone right through the central mass of the aorta. Mercymorn withdrew with the same precise, swift movement and stepped backward, rapier dripping with blood. That was her mistake.

Your heart closed over the rapier as it punctured: your heart closed over the rapier as it withdrew. The slit so close to your breastbone sealed over instantaneously, just as fast as her stab, like an immunisation jab in Drearburh.

I readied my sword, and I saw her eyes widen, just a fraction.

“It’s too late in the game to have learned that trick, infant,” said the Lyctor.

I swung. She parried automatically. The sword knocked her rapier to the side, and I backstepped. I needed space. I tried to remember everything you’d learned about this crazy-eyed witch, but it was like thinking through mud. I knew I didn’t want her to touch me, but I didn’t quite know why. The heat haze was turning the room into a sweaty fog, making the red light pouring down from the alarms overhead a wavering strobe. It made her look like she was moving when she wasn’t—she just stood there, perfectly still, that lovely balanced rapier still wet with your blood and that net looking like it was twitching in her hand. All I could do was circle, sword held in a guard across your chest like this time I could protect your heart. Even if I’d been in my own body, I would have been panicking; but I was in yours, and she knew the only game I had. The fuck was I going to do, regrow your thumbs at her?

The net flicked. The damn thing looked like a gossamer slip, but it was weighted; I thought she’d just use it to tangle, not like freaking bolas. It caught me by one ankle and sent you to the ground because I still didn’t understand your weight—knocked all the air from your lungs and dragged us to her. With one flick of her arm we were lying prone in front of her. She flipped that rapier downward: thumb on the pommel, hilt high over her head, readied for one downward thrust that would go right between the eyes, slamming through cartilage, angled upward into your brain.

And then there was a haptic click and a huge blasting noise that ripped the Lyctor’s chest all to fuck. She stumbled forward; I rolled us away. Mercymorn was on her knees, and she was screaming. Not in pain, but in the way we’d first heard her screaming, that warbling bellow of absolute fear, her arms and legs twitching in helpless, spasmodic wriggles. Then she tipped over in a growing pool of blood on the floor.

I was on your feet with the sword, panting; in the doorway I’d come from stood a woman. She was shouldering a huge double-barrelled gun, and the wisps of smoke from the barrel shimmered in that red heat.

She wore a little white tunic, stained with blood. Her feet were bare. Her head was bare. Her pale sugar-brown curls frizzed in that moist, smouldering air, and her face was too pale, and her eyes were dark and dull, not the incandescent blue that was like staring into radioactive water. I would’ve known her anywhere. We’d killed her.

I breathed, “Dulcinea,” because I was a chump, and then—“Cytherea.”

The dead Lyctor did something with that heavy gun again—she angled it open with a click, and more thin streams of smoke emerged from the other end of the barrels. She wore a bandolier of bullets, and she palmed one and slid it in the barrel and pulled the body of the gun back over it. She was incredibly quick, and I didn’t quite follow her. Mercymorn was still juddering and crying out—it didn’t seem like she was actually dying, but she was frothing at the mouth like a rabid animal.

Cytherea looked at me with that dead-eyed, stony expression; and then, very slowly, she pointed the nose of the gun down.

I didn’t know what to say—Thank you? Is this like round five now? I didn’t have to say anything, because her mouth opened, and the voice was Cytherea’s but the gravelly, hard-as-nails tone wasn’t. “Goodbye,” she said.

And Cytherea’s body turned around and, gun raised, slowly stomped back out into the corridor; walking heavily and painfully, like it hurt. I was too amazed to do anything. I stared at that thin back—those pronounced, painful shoulder blades, the fine bumps of the spine.

Sorry. Maybe I should’ve gone for her. Like, I can imagine what you’d say. All I can say is that it was complicated back in Canaan House, and sometimes a cute older girl shows you a lot of attention, because she’s bored or whatever, and you sort of have this maybe-flirting maybe-not thing going on, right, and then it turns out she’s an ancient warrior who’s killed all your friends and she’s coming for you, and then you both die and she turns up ages later in the broiling heat on a sacred space station and like, it’s complicated. Just saying that it happens all the time.

All I could do was stand there, sword raised, as the Lyctor thrashed mindlessly on the floor next to us, and say: “What the fuck is going on?”

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