She caught reflections of her face in the windows of shops as they trundled through the vendor district. Her flawless skin and amber hair did nothing to hide the distance in her eyes; what beauty she had was ruined by the sadness lurking there. Stallholders were already erecting their pitches, piling high stacks of fat votive candles, cloth penitent hoods, paper offerings and icons cast out of resin. Once or twice there was the crack of a whip on the wind, but that might have just been the cables. The cable-carriage clanked past a flatbed piled high with what seemed to be hessian corpse sacks, there and then. gone. At an interchange, a train of teenagers, ashen, shaven-headed and sexless, were led across the avenue by priests in bright regalia. Then the cab was moving again, the driver plucking at the wires in the road to steer it.

Verity sighed, and it felt like knives in her chest. Gloom crowded her. She was hollow and echoing within, as if everything that had made her who she was had been scooped out and destroyed. Once again, tears prickled at her eyes and she gasped, trying to hold them back and failing.

Through the gauzy muslin curtains across the carriage she saw the Convent of Saint Katherine emerging in the distance, and presently the woman surrendered herself to the grief that churned within her, muffling her sobs in the folds of her black shawl.

They buried Sister Lethe in the memorial garden, a space of light and greenery on the southern face of the convent. It grew out of the side of the building in a flat disc-shaped terrace, emerging from the wide portal doors of the chapel. The garden was dominated by a statue of Saint Katherine, dressed in the armour of a Sister Seraphim. She stood as if ready to leap off her plinth and take to the air, carved coils of flame and smoke licking from the jump pack on her

back.

In keeping with her new status and penances, Iona was not permitted to attend the funeral. Instead, Cassandra walked ahead of the pallbearer helots in their white robes, a censer of votive oils burning as she swung it back and forth like a pendulum. Miriya, Isabel and Portia followed the cloaked body, their black Celestian armour polished to a mirror-bright sheen. In accordance with the rites of the order, cloths of red silk were tied across the barrels of their guns to signify the silence of the weapons in this moment of reflection.

Reiko, the veteran Sister Superior who served Canoness Galatea as her aide, conducted the ceremony in a correct but not heartfelt manner. A scattering of other Battle Sisters, women that Miriya

did not know by sight - most likely members of the Convent's garrison - paid their respects as they were wont to do. Yet, not one of them had known Lethe, none of them had fought alongside her against traitors and xenos, none of them had bled red for the same patches of accursed ground.