You did not begin to know how to answer that. The Body reached out, and stroked her fingers forward, as though to close your eyes: you were too tired to imagine how those fingertips would feel on your lids, how that thumb might brush down the bridge of your nose. You closed your eyes in obedient response. And then—you poor brokenhearted sad sack—you fell deeply asleep.

In the morning, the Body was gone.

“Here is the strategy for engagement,” said Mercymorn.

She had wheeled a large piece of opaque white plex before the dinner table where you and Ianthe and Augustine and Ortus were seated, clustered close to her, with the Emperor at the end of the table busying himself with his own work—with his tablet and his diagrams, with his styluses and flimsy. By this point, it had been nearly two months since the death of the fourteenth planet. All the window shutters had been down for weeks. This contributed to a general sense of living inside a box, which you did not mind: there were no windows in Drearburh, though there had always been a sense of depth that made you feel freer than you did upon this flat collection of rings and corridors.

Your teacher stood before this assembled throng in her Canaanite robe, looking fragile as a white flower with a rotten-peach heart, and she said, “The engagement could go on for three hours. It could go on for eight. It could go on for a week … Assume that timing is labile, and proceed accordingly. Next!”

The Saint of Joy drew a large cylindrical tube on the plex whiteboard, with a fat black soft-tip pen. She segmented and labelled the cylinder from top to bottom, each a neat interval apart: EPIRHOIC. MESORHOIC. BATHYRHOIC. BARATHRON.

“The greatest portion of the fight will take place here, as normal,” she said, emphatically underlining EPIRHOIC. “We must use the bank as much as possible. Once the Beast tires—you’ll know because it will try to run—we wrestle it down to the mesorhoic layer, then the bathyrhoic, and then to the barathron. Once we’re there, the stoma will open—and we push it through. Simple!!

“Not,” Mercymorn added acidly, in case anyone had mistaken her.

Ortus said, “I maintain we should drive it downward at the start.”

“No thanks! Not all of us are spearfishers! Next!” she said, but the Saint of Duty wasn’t done; as he occasionally did, he ground forward with the force of gravity, and added doggedly:

“Our swiftest fight against a Beast took place in the bathyrhoic layer.”

“Yes, and Number Eight wasn’t tired by the time we got to the barathron, and Ulysses the First had to wrestle it through the stoma, and he is as we speak languishing in Hell! It’s a Resurrection Beast, honey! Thank you! Next!!”