“Yes! Thank you,” said your teacher, “except that I noted your use of the assumption, and I would like to remind you, infant, that I also hated you on sight. The Beast’s brain will sit in the epirhoic layer, and it will attack us in—any way it chooses. Each Beast is different. I have fought numerous now, and each Beast is quite unlike any other … Number Two spewed quicksilver and remade itself into hundred-foot spikes. Number Six kept sucking us into enormous sphincters and spraying us with worms. I cannot even remember what it looked like. I remember Number Four … it was a humanoid creature with a beautiful face who held me under the water, and it spoke in a lovely voice but it only repeated, die, die—and I recall Number One as a great and incoherent machine … when I saw it I thought it had a great tail, and a thousand broken pillars on its back, but Cassiopeia saw it as a mechanical monster with swords for wings, and great horns of myelin, tessellated over with graves.”

It was the Saint of Duty who said, restlessly: “Number Eight was a giant head.”

“Finned like a fish,” said Augustine, lost in reverie. “Its ribs were bloody bandages, and its teeth protruded through its own skull, tangled about its face like a nest. It was red, and it had a single eye of green that moved all about the body … Look,” he said, coming back to himself, perhaps seeing something in your and Ianthe’s expressions. “They’re not great, is what we are saying.”

Ianthe said, “Then this is a waste of time, eldest sister. We can’t plan on fighting it.”

“We can arrange our formation,” said the Saint of Joy primly. “Take your own section of the Beast, and concentrate. You, idiot baby, will take the east. Augustine will take the west, Ortus the north. I will take southmost to its central point, whatever that point looks like, and whatever it may be—it may be we can’t even comprehend it spatially, but at that point, fight it and get out of everyone else’s way.”

You said, “What about me?”

No one looked at you, except for Mercymorn. Ianthe’s gaze was fixed in some totally different direction, perhaps her appointed east; Augustine was lighting a neatly rolled cigarette, and the Saint of Duty simply studied the shield pulled down over the wide window that had used to look out into space. Even God did not look up from whatever administrative work concerned the Prince Undying. The only eyes for you were Mercy’s: that endless, red-shaded hurricane, sinking into those sandy brown depths, moving over the face of grey waters.

“Just don’t get in the way,” she said.