“Decency.” Her fingers tightened on the skull. “As if you have a right to talk. Daphne—”

“Ms. Mains,” she said, “was a tragic loss, but don’t dare talk to me about her as if you understand. Did you seek her out? I did, after Alexander’s death. She lay in a bed, dreaming horrors. Her family kept her in a tower room, surrounded by the stuffed toys of her childhood, tended by a live-in nurse. Unable to care for herself in the most basic ways, at twenty-two. And she was still inside that wasted meat, do you understand? Suffering. Broken. A mind in pieces. I fixed her. I offered her a path out, and I made her take it. The pieces of her that were gone, I rebuilt. I filled her hollows with demonglass. I summoned and bound beings into her body. In the end she was almost herself again.”

“And you talk about the man who broke her as if he was some kind of saint.”

“He was a genius, which is something other than a saint. And in his genius he left many projects, including Ms. Mains, and I daresay you, unfinished. I have always been more of a theorist than a Technician, but we can’t afford to abandon his work.”

“His evil work.”

“And there you show your true colors. You, student of the Hidden Schools, child of centuries of struggle, fall back on that old pathetic word fools and idiots chanted at the first Craftswomen they bound in the stocks, while they warmed the branding irons.”

“We fought the God Wars for freedom, and you throw that struggle in my face to endorse the work of a madman developing better tools of slavery.”

“We fought the God Wars for power, child. That’s what freedom is. No one fights for any other reason.”

“You’re wrong.”

“Which of us do you think has the surer truth?” She spread her arms. “The one who believes continents are shattered in the name of high-minded ideals, or the one who believes contents are shattered because two people who can shatter continents want different things?”

Abernathy clutched the skull in her hands as if to crush it.