Immediately you reached for the bone-scabbarded blade you kept lashed to your back. He said with a touch of frustration, “Your rapier,” and you just stared. He held his spear in his left hand, its point a razor-sharp omen, and his plain rapier with the scarlet ribbon in his right; an ancient funeral bouquet was in tatters by his feet. Ortus had not shaved his head in the last week or so, and the stubble on his bony skull was a cap of brownish russet fuzz like a splash of forgotten blood.

“There’s no reason to kill me,” you said, and marvelled at it, suddenly, the ease of the conclusion.

The Saint of Duty did not answer you. He stood in the corridor with an impassive face, and you said: “The Resurrection Beast will be here within hours. I am going to die. And yet you are here to kill me now?” He did not answer. “That isn’t the act of someone removing a liability. You are either killing me for fun—doubtful—or out of anger—I’m unsure why—or for personal gain.”

Ortus looked at you again. Then he sheathed that plain rapier and twitched the wicked point of his spear up to face the ceiling.

“You’re wrong,” he said.

“How?”

“You’re still a liability.”

“Tell me.”

You thought he would not answer. But then he said, haltingly, in the manner of a man saying something difficult in a language he did not speak well: “Don’t go to the River. End it yourself. Before they breach. Cut off your oxygen. Or however you like.” At your expression, Ortus added as though it were an explanation: “So you don’t … suffer.”

“Why do you care if I suffer?”

“Because I was the one who failed you,” he said briefly. “I pulled too many punches.” And: “Sorry.”

And, most horribly of all: “This wasn’t my idea.”

Then the Saint of Duty turned and walked away from you, disappearing out the mouth of the corridor, into the habitation atrium and beyond. You were suddenly seized with the conviction that the universe would not have judged you if you had lain down in that corridor, shed fifteen years, and thrown an absolute tantrum; if you had pelted the cool panel floor beneath you with hands and fists and wailed. It meant so much that you would die with so many questions unanswered, would go to your unkind grave understanding absolutely jack shit.

“Whose idea?” you called after him, and your voice rose to a shriek. “Whose idea?”

In a way, it helped. Nothing added to your resolution to live so much as someone else suggesting that you die. Ten minutes later you were eating leftover stew in the kitchen with something close to animation, choking down your last lunch before the apocalypse. And you were angry. You were always such a little bitch when you were angry.

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