“That was never home,” he said. “I am taking Cytherea back to sleep with her brothers and sisters.”

You ached. You burnt. The Body’s fingernails ran a smooth, cool rill down your hot cheek, and she made you look instead at the bone-and-skin boxes behind you, at the dead who were only sleeping now and had been privy to the oldest miracle you knew. Part of your promise had been fulfilled. You wanted to be relieved, but no longer recalled how that worked, glandularly speaking.

Now you and God stood facing each other. You could study him without shyness: the shining iridescence of his irises, the unyielding black of the cornea and pupil, the long, square, urbane face. God had very deep lines at his forehead and beneath his eyes. His brows were somewhat sorrowful, but the rest of his face was humourous and mobile, plain and normal. The cool white lights of the docking bay picked out all the parts on his shirt that were shiny with wear, and cast the warm browns of his hands and face into an everyday ochre. If you had seen him and not known you would have thought him utterly nondescript; but you could not look at him and not know. Terrible divinity clung to his skin.

“You could resurrect them,” you said, without bothering to filter much between thought and speech. “You alone are capable of it. But you won’t. Why?”

“For the same reason that I haven’t for ten thousand years,” he said. “For the same reason that I cannot come back to the Nine Houses. The cost is too great.”

You swayed a little. Maybe you fell. The metal grille was beneath your knees, making red sore marks in your flesh, the air through the grate reeking of antistatic pastes. You said into the panels, “Teach me, Lord, how to count that cost.”

God helped you up instead. He put his hands beneath your armpits in a perfectly normal way and raised you to stand, and clasped your arms clumsily—a quick, awkward squeeze, as though wanting to comfort and not knowing how—before he took his hands away. He said, “Harrow, you won’t kneel to me. I won’t let you, not until you know exactly what it means when you do it. It hurts me to see you perform obeisance when—if you knew the full story—you might strike me full in the face instead.”

You coloured at that, and protested, “My God—”

“And you shouldn’t call me God either,” he said. “You don’t comprehend the word, and I don’t want to be God to you yet. You’re an invalid, not a disciple. Listen to me. Can you do that? I hate to push you, Harrowhark, but we have so little time.”

This was not to be borne. “I still maintain some of my faculties, Lord.”

“Well, that’s all anyone can hope for,” he said.