This particular garment, a deep spinel-tinged satin, exposed one shoulder entirely, and it was the shoulder of what you had come to think of as the arm: the right arm that Cytherea the First had removed just above the elbow, with somebody else’s reattached wholesale. The new limb hung heavy from its olecranal point with a bluish seam. It looked fat and swollen and unused, which was ridiculous, because you had never been able to see anything wrong with it. It had been very nicely matched to the original until she had ceased using it altogether, and the difference was more pronounced each day. Unconscious of your critical eye, she scratched fretfully at the line until red hives appeared.

“Fifteen ten,” said your sister Lyctor, as soon as she noticed you.

You said, “Eight thirty-four,” and she said, “My God! Hark at the creature. Eight thirty-four … and such a dreadful pity that it doesn’t even matter.”

She was in a filthy mood, if she was wearing that thing, with her arm exposed. You were not in the best frame of mind yourself.

“Let us interrogate,” you said. “Does it not matter because despite cutting three whole minutes off your previous time you could never hope to challenge me in this arena, or does it not matter because I’m going to die to Number Seven?”

“You’re being damned optimistic if you think you’ll live to see Number Seven,” she said, blue eyed, those oily little freckles glittering almost pinkly above the dress. They reflected the red rims of her eyelids. You thought that she had been crying. “I’m amazed you made it here from the docking bay without getting assassinated, Harry.”

“I will not answer to that sobriquet.”

“Close the door and I’ll call you Nonagesimus.”

There were a few academic reasons that you closed the door, and from the inside, rather than behind you as you left. Her quarters held some measure of safety for you, as she warded with the paranoid focus of an escaped murderer, and therefore half as tightly as you did. You got better autopsies of her encounters with Beasts than you did from your own, as Augustine was wont to explain significantly more to her than either he or Mercy did to you.