The Saint of Joy and the Saint of Patience were—distracted—with another matter, that matter being God and a heretical three-way division of saliva. Ianthe had walked away from you, all split lips and gay loneliness; had she walked, less drunk with every step, toward the little room where Ortus bent over a dead woman? Was his ruined heart a gesture for your benefit? Would she leave so much blood; would she come here?

Ortus’s corpse heaved for breath inside the incinerator, and coughed, though you could not hear the sound.

You watched as, trembling, he slapped a hand to hide his nude and livid wound. All around him, the incinerator mechanism rumbled to life. You spun away and looked up. In the protected plex booth stood Cytherea, spotlit by the strong white light from the panels above her, leaning heavily upon some handle within; a dead woman staring at you through dark and filmy eyes, her face freckled with drying blood, petals in her limp ringlets.

The flesh was dead, but the hate in that face was alive and well and living. You looked at the walking corpse within the cramped control booth, that wraith of irradiated loathing, and as you were frozen by that gaze she shouldered forward—moving as though throwing her limbs; moving as though she wore her body weightily as lead, and each joint’s flexure meant heaving an enormous mass—and, keeping her eyes on yours, she flipped a switch.

The valves groaned and popped with heat. They sounded like the acceleration of some great engine. And Cytherea turned, and with each limb dangling out of time with its mate, she limped away.

Within the incinerator, Ortus looked at you. In the shadows of the incinerator, his eyes seemed very dark. There was no bloom of necromantic power, nor move to save himself: the third saint to serve the King Undying stared at you with something very like helplessness, lying there with his heart exploded, a man before the flame.

You thought that you might gather up his ashes in a box and keep them. You imagined what kind of construct might be made from the bricks and mortar of the bones of a sacred Hand, a man who in an act of sacred transgression had used another human soul to fire the ravenous battery of his heart. You thought about sleeping for six whole hours a night, in a bed alone. You thought about proving your sanity: to Ianthe, to Mercy, to God. You prepared to follow Cytherea—to run on bare feet back up those stairs, into the filtration rooms, and to head off that loping, shambling cadaver at the pass. You imagined the answer to that mystery.