“We cannot afford to pose,” he said, but there was a faint smile at his weary mouth. “Ianthe the First is a continual surprise to me. If I was going to pass out a fourth epithet, I’d call her the Saint of Awe.”

You thought that had not quite suited Naberius, though it was hard to remember the Prince of Ida, these days. He was a face and a set of eyes and very little else. It was as though your brain had formed a scab over everything that had happened to you. But you pressed: “Lord, it’s not certain that I’m going to die.”

He did not correct your Lord, then. In those oil-slick, inconceivable eyes, you saw a flicker of something you did not understand. God said, “Harrowhark, to that, to everything, all I can say is that I live in hope. And that you need to keep handling your rapier.”

So you kept handling your rapier. It was on one of these late nights, coming back to your room with a heavy heart and bare feet, running with sweat, arms screaming in the wrong places, your fingers red and raw beneath their coats of cartilage, that you came to the flesh-pillar atrium before the habitation ring, and noticed that the autodoor to Cytherea’s tomb was shut. It was never shut. Its wounded openness, the thin smell of perpetual roses that always seemed to drift from that terrible monument, was a constant. Now it was closed.

You stood before that door, hearing the quiet injunction of your Emperor to maybe … not. In a very real way, he was correct. You did not understand your fears enough to confront them. You did not even understand if they were real. Back when you were a child and hung up on something you thought you had seen or heard, Crux would say: You saw what you saw, Lady, and the only thing you control now is your reaction thereto. You had seen the corpse walking. Now you would react. The steel of the door was very close to your face, and misted up with your breath.

With one swift movement, you pushed it open.