“Yes. Yes, me too,” she said heatedly, in unexpected accord. “That was disgusting, to say the least. Old people should be shot.”

The underfloor lights glowed their cool blue, trying to soothe you into circadian sleep. A Cohort officer with grey tags at their sleeves lay enshrined in a niche opposite, an eyeless steel mask laid heavily on their face. Both you and Ianthe were breathing as though you had run a footrace, laboured and loud. Ianthe’s hair was in long margarine tangles down her neck, and her mascara was smudged beneath her eyes, and her ribs were heaving as though she were in an asthmatic fit. She carried her high-heeled shoes in her gilded skeleton hand, and they made for a strange juxtaposition. The breath-soft lavender gauze had a tiny violet stain on the front, and her mouth was red: she had been chewing her lips, and they had broken, and split. You realised with an uneasy start that you were both, in fact, quite drunk.

Ianthe ran a tongue across those wounded lips and said, “I suppose this is it.”

You said, “I appreciate your part in this, Tridentarius,” but before you could stop her, she drew you close with her living arm, and she bent her head to yours. You understood this inevitability only a second before it happened. Perhaps there was a dark universe in which you reached for her; in another you exploded her heart in her chest. In this one, as she lowered her mouth, you turned your face away, and her kiss fell on the side of your jaw. Both of you reeked of alcohol. Minute traces of blood smudged your cheek with tiny perfume blots of thalergy as she brushed her broken mouth across it with unanticipated tenderness. There was a rigid trembling somewhere in your sternum. When she raised her head again her gaze was cool and mocking, as though your inability to receive a kiss was yet more proof of limitation.

Your mouth was very dry when you said: “My affections lie buried in the Locked Tomb.”

“And let them lie,” she said, laughingly, and not very kindly. “Somebody might even exhume them for you. Good luck, Harry … try not to die.”

She walked off swinging her dancing shoes in her dead arm, and she even hummed tunelessly beneath her breath, before she disappeared down the corridor: a lone wax figure in pale purple chiffon, tall and colourless—except in the greasy metal of her bone arm, which the lights rendered all the colours of the rainbow. You could hear her carefree humming even after she disappeared, as you stood outside the dining room stock-still and frozen.

When it died away, you turned to your assassination.