And then you iced your hands over with thick wads of cartilage, slid them into the handle of the door, and pulled with all your might. It did not respond. Living bone burst from your fingertips in grossly exaggerated distal tips, and you snapped them off at their bleeding edge. The pain distracted you, and you screamed aloud, to focus. This bone you unfolded into a seething web of phalanges and nuggety clumps of palm bones, pressed into the door; then those distal tips you turned into fluid, and this fluid you turned into liquid ash a micrometre thick, a very—weeny—construct. You syruped this broth through the microscopic crack in the door’s seam. The incinerator’s mechanism ignited somewhere in the vents above you with a thump—the Saint of Duty followed the flow of a nozzle spraying transparent liquid before his feet—and you wrenched the door from its hinges; you tossed it down the breadth of the room, in a mad, idiot, beautiful rush, and you walked straight into the petals of a chemical fire. An alarm shrieked overhead as though it too were roasting to death.

In the second that you saw the ruddy white surge of flame, you did not know it was hot enough to melt steel. You only saw the steps of what you had to do. One of the arms with the liquid-ash fingertips had resolved into two skeletons behind you, their outside layers wet with regenerating ash. You rocketed them forward to drag Ortus by the legs. You exploded their spines into a solid wall of regrowing bone, into a rushing avalanche of reeking, liquid, perpetual marrow, plunging it into that fire as a thousand-layered barrier, the fire versus the bone, unfolding and unfolding and unfolding as the flames burned and burned and burned. You stripped the fucking enamel from your own teeth and added that to the squelching, scorching layer. It was the first time, as a Lyctor, exploding such tonnage of bone into an incinerator’s flame, that you looked upon the limit of your power: and that limit still stretched so far out into the goddamn distance that it was out of your sight.

The incinerator buckled. The alarm screamed. You grabbed Ortus and pulled him down the side of the room as a mass of hot melted bone sludged from the door. You dragged him away from that singeing, choking, killing mass, and you laid him against the bulkhead.

He was almost totally incapacitated. His eyes were closed. You moved his hands away and looked more closely at that shattered heart; the wounds were closing, but slowly, far more slowly than you would have expected. His cyanosed lips bespoke terrible effort as his heart knit back together. He was a myriad-old Lyctor. You did not understand.

The Saint of Duty said, with a kind of hoarse solemnity: “Fresh blood wards. Every night.”

You said, too surprised not to sound like a moron: “What?”