You closed your eyes and tried to think. It was so difficult. You so badly wanted to sleep. You were doing so many things at once—your sole remaining powers of concentration were given over to this moment. For a second or two you forgot the word that you were looking for—it was on the tip of your tongue—while you were building, minutely, stromal cell by stromal cell.

“Marrow,” you said.

The Saint of Duty exploded outward as your construct emerged from his abdomen. Your soup was watery and mediocre, as soup went, but as a delivery method for gelid explosives—marrow rendered through so much water as to not pass comment—it was perfect. Half a dozen arms shattered him in the soft electric light from the overhead panels. You let out your breath, and coalescing scythes destroyed intestines—lungs—heart. Then you fired upward, toward the brain.

And God said, “Stop.”

The world slowed down. Augustine and Mercymorn stopped, arrested in the act of half-rising from their seats. Ianthe stopped, left arm paused, outflung, to shield her face. You stopped, sitting upright in your chair: your bones somehow rigid and still, and your flesh chilly and rigid around those bones. The shrapnel spray from the Saint of Duty did not stop—it cascaded across the table like the crest of a pink waterfall, pitter-pattering down on bowls and the tablecloth and the polished dark surface of the wood. But what remained of him stopped too, half man, half rupture—his prurient details hot and white, naked insides clothed with the sinus-drying burst of the power of God.

The Emperor of the Nine Houses—the Resurrection—the First Reborn—sat at the end of the table, his plain face splattered with gore, and his eyes were the death of light.

The Necrolord Prime said, very calmly, “Ten thousand years since I’ve eaten human being, Harrow, and I didn’t really want an encore. Now tell me what you have done.”

Your body was unyielding, but your mouth had purchase. You said, “I reconfigured a clump of marrow stem cells into sesamoid bone. From the sesamoid bone, I made a construct.”

“Harrowhark,” he said, “you cannot have perceived foreign bone marrow within the body of a Lyctor. I’m not sure Mercy could perceive it with her arms draped around Ortus the whole time.”

“The cells weren’t foreign.”

“What?”

“I sectioned my tibia for the soup,” you said.

God’s eyes closed, very briefly. He pushed his bowl another fraction away. You stared down the table at him: at the blank, remote faces of your two nominal teachers—at the frozen ivory stillness of Ianthe, her hair now whitish pink—at space outside the window, where the asteroids themselves seemed to hang in tranquilized arrest. He said, “You must know that I won’t let either of you kill the other before my very eyes, Harrow.”