As God, Mercymorn, and Augustine looked over the incinerator, they left you alone, sitting in the filtration room with Ortus. You did not often trust instinct, but you were not afraid of him then, seeing him sit on an upturned box the same way you were sitting, wiry, and empty-faced, and defeated. You were just angry.

“You saw what you saw,” you said. “You must have seen her stab you. The blow was from the front, with your own spear.”

Ortus said, “I don’t know.”

“You were conscious. You spoke to me.”

He said, “I don’t know.”

“We had a conversation. I want to know what it meant.”

He said, “I don’t remember.”

You looked into his clear green eyes; his expression had not changed, and neither had his voice. You could not keep the disbelieving contempt from yours when you said, “You don’t remember?”

The Saint of Duty turned his body toward you. He was clutching his rapier; but it was idle, in the crook of his elbow, in more the manner of an abandoned broom than of a weapon ready for war. His eyebrows were very slightly drawn together, a sort of exhausted crinkle. He looked at you, and he said in a voice you had known since you were eight years old: “I sometimes—forget.”

It was the tone—clinical, enamelled, half-defensive, half-endangered—the tone of someone admitting a final frailty. It was familiar because you had used it yourself. Understand I am insane.

Later on, when the Mithraeum was searched, Cytherea’s body was no longer on its altar; and God said he could not detect it anywhere on the station at all.

When you were back in your rooms—your now-familiar, almost-welcome, neat and empty rooms—you opened a vein and set about replacing all your bone wards with blood. It took you hours. You did not fully ward the plex outside, which would have needed complex and careful remote construct work, but you placed an extra skein of wards around the interior windows, and hoped the quick fix would do for one quiet night. You were standing in your little foyer blowing a fine grit of bone dust over a wet blood ward when you heard footsteps outside your rooms.

You stood very still, and you listened.

“I hope you’re happy.”

“Not a bit.”

“What a farce … what a grotesque, awful, miserable farce.”

“Well, for goodness’ sake, how was I to know they’d trip the incineration alarm? God, it’s always the one you don’t turn off.”

“As though I meant that.”

“If you mean the other—you were in serious danger of overegging the pudding. Nobody would ever believe you would get that drunk accidentally.”

“Piss off,” came the response. “I nearly slapped you. Don’t you dare use her as a lever, ever again. Bringing her into it … and your nincompoop brother with her … almost isn’t worth the payment.”