She stepped out of the stone into a semicircular chamber, brightly ghostlit, walls painted flat beige. Decades ago they’d been rough-hewn rock, lit by flickering candles, but occult design customs didn’t mesh with the demands of a modern office. In the seventies Jace’s predecessor had hired Graefax Tepes Ross, design consultants to the Dread Empire and to the Deathless Kings of the New World, to modernize the Order’s look. Kai thought she would have preferred it the old way.

Tunnels branched from the chamber. Kai turned left: up, and in.

She passed two junior priests arguing Iskari theology. “They want to reduce sacrifice flight domestically, which makes it a policy goal when negotiating treaties abroad. Which means us. You don’t seem to understand our position.”

“No, I do. The thing is we can’t afford to recognize their rules. Preparing to satisfy reporting requirements is tantamount to honoring those requirements. If you think—”

“You’re not even listening to me.”

“I’d listen if you—”

Kai walked on, and their argument receded into insignificance.

She reached the office levels and kept climbing, two more floors and right, down a hall paneled in cherrywood, through a glass door, to the library.

A golem sat behind the front desk, bucket of coffee clutched in a clawed metal hand. Servos spun as it raised the coffee to its mouth-port. Lenses in its eyes realigned with delicate clicks. Kai walked past the desk to the windows at the library’s far wall, which opened on to the caldera. Other office windows glowed across the pit, human constellations echoing the stars in the alien sky above and the pool below.

No sense lingering, but how could she resist one glance, possibly her last, on the star-studded space at the caldera floor where by all rights lava should have bubbled, one glance at the hole where she’d rebuilt herself, the womb that birthed her people? A few figures stood there on the beach at the end of everything, heads bent in prayer. Her shoulders ached, and her heart too, to swim again through the black, to breathe the uncreated, once more to weld soul and dogma into living form.

Not now. Maybe never again.

She turned, and ran into a wall of Gavin.

He stood behind her, lumbering and tall as ever. He clutched a bag of scrolls to his chest, and he wore a polo shirt and slacks and a shocked expression. His lips tried three times to form her name before it came out once: “Kai! What are you doing here?”

She would have winced anywhere, but most especially in the library at night. The carrels and long tables were almost empty—a handful of acolytes leafing through old contracts and Craft journals—which made the silence, and their anger when it broke, more profound. Still, she couldn’t begrudge his wide smile, so glad to see her.