There was a blur of faces, of movement. Harrow found that she was not shocked, after all. She was consumed. She was the kindling for the arson taking place in her heart, her brain dry wadding for the flames, her soul so much incandescent gas. She could not do this. She absolutely and fundamentally could not do this.

“Harrow?” said someone close by—someone familiar; her vision swam.

“If I forget you, let my right hand be forgotten,” her mouth was saying. “Add more also, if aught but death part me and thee.”

And, unsteadily: “Griddle.”

The hands must have withdrawn; she found herself facedown on the mattress, sobbing as she had not sobbed since she was a child. Someone said, “Everybody out. Go—” But this was more than she could take stock of. Harrow was too amazed by her body’s expanding capacity for despair. It was as though her feeling doubled even as she looked at it, unfolding, like falling down an endless flight of stairs. She dug her hands into the mattress and she cried for Gideon Nav.

She only stopped weeping when her body had physically exhausted itself. The tears could not flow from gummed-up eyes; nor sobs from a cracked throat. For a long time she pressed her face into the wet patch of mattress she had cried into, and smelled the old stuffing, and felt the grief that had multiplied into a universe.

She sat up. She breathed. She pressed her face into the front of her worn black robes, and dried her tears into chilly tracks on her cheeks. Harrowhark looked around her, and the bloody rawness of her throat made her guttural as she asked curtly: “What have I done?”

“That was actually a question I’d hoped you’d answer,” said Abigail Pent.

She was the only one left in the room. Harrow looked her over with new eyes. Even with this new perspective, in all respects Pent was the same as ever. Neat, if a little scuffed around the edges, as though she really had been slumming in an ice-cold Canaan House and had not had a proper bath in a while—brown-eyed and fresh-faced, every inch a daughter of the Fifth. There was a scarf tied around that immaculate hair, and she wore large puffy mittens on each hand.

She was not, more to the point, the ruptured corpse she and Gideon had found at the bottom of the facility stairs: the body with the slit abdomen, with a key sealed neatly inside her kidney. She seemed alive, and well, and living.

“You died,” said Harrowhark. “Septimus killed you. The Lyctor masquerading as Septimus.”

“Yes,” said the Fifth adept. “It was unpleasant. Look, I hate to ask, but did you—get her? None of us are sure.”