The klaxon ended. It kept ringing in your ears long after it was gone. Augustine’s voice crackled over the line, quite wearily: “What a dolt. She knows not to look within a kilometre of the thing’s predicted arrival. Well, it’s here early, and so are we. Back to bed, everyone.”

And you went back to bed. The shutters did not come up again. You would learn that they would not; you would learn that the Mithraeum would only be privy to even more shielding in the days ahead, lest the Emperor of the Nine Houses look upon what approached. But that night you just lay next to the Body, and you noticed that her eyes were open very wide, and that in the darkness they were death-mask gold.

You said, “Beloved?”

She said, “It’s coming,” with the most anticipatory astonishment you had ever heard in her low, many-personed voice—right then she used the voice of your father’s cavalier. And: “It’s near!”

Had she ever been astonished before? Had she ever been uneasy? You were lying face-to-face with her, centimetres from the wet sheen of her skin that ought to have made an imprint on your pillow, facing that crinkled lower lip. Her eyes, which the night lights had turned the sick amber of a healing bruise, stared through you. The Body was troubled: in that hovering place so close to the end of your life, it seemed only natural that you should reach for her. The fear of death had remade your worship into desperation, or maybe desire. You reached one hand out for that frozen tangle of hair at the back of the skull; you closed the gap between you, and you kissed that lovely corpse mouth.

Of course, you could not. There was nothing there. Contact made her drift away, just as with any of your hallucinations. You had not touched her. Maybe you had not even reached for her. The Body watched you with an expression you were terribly afraid was pity.

You said, “Please,” and you reached out again. A wave of dizziness rocked you. You pushed at the robe lying crooked at the slope of her shoulder; you pressed your hand low to her belly. Her dignity was untouched by this gross urgency, this coarse frenzy; or maybe, again, you had not done it. You said again, “Please.”

As though you had crossed no boundary, and above the soundless rough shouting in your ears, the Body said: “I have to go away for a while,” and you regretted everything.

“I have done wrong,” you said.

There was the tiniest suggestion of a furrow in that cool unbreathing brow, and she said, “How?”