“You both had more grit at seven years old than I ever had in my entire life,” said Ortus. “You are the most worthy heroes the Ninth House could muster. I truly believe that. And that is why I am staying. I am not a hero, Harrow. I never was. But now that I have died without hope for heroism in life, I will hope better for heroism in death. And therefore I will fight the Sleeper with you.”

It was difficult to know what to do with this type of touch. It made her whole soul flinch, but at the same time opened some primeval infant mechanism within her, as though the embrace were a mirror: having someone hold up an image by which you could see yourself, rather than living with an assumption of your face. It was not like the touch of her father or mother. When she had first sat by the tomb in shivering awe, she had fancied that the Body’s ice-ridden fingers had shifted for hers, minutely. Gideon had touched her in truth; Gideon had floundered toward her in the saltwater with that set, unsheathed expression she wore before a fight, her mouth colourless from the cold. Harrow had welcomed her end, but suffered a different death blow altogether—and she had become, for the second time, herself. She untangled from Ortus, more reluctantly than she’d expected.

Ortus said, “Come down. Hear the plan. I helped craft it—it is not complicated, but it is the only plan we have.”

“I will,” she said.

Harrow bent to retrieve the book he had dropped when he had stood—it fell open at the flyleaf. A message was still readable, written in faded ink, in strong, cramped letters:

ONE FLESH, ONE END.

G. & P.

She and Gideon had looked over the contents of the drawers. Cigarette ash. Buttons. Time-abandoned toothbrushes. An ancient emblem of the House of the Second. Whetstones and guns. She now knew what the P stood for: Pyrrha Dve.

But what about G? What if one had altered one’s temporal bone to affect the tympanic lobe to overwrite a specific word with something different? Her adjustment had been meant to catch a name, but it had ended up catching two. Mercy, and Augustine, and God must have thought her mad. As for the Saint of Duty himself—

“His name isn’t Ortus,” she said, totally bewildered.

She found Ortus looking at her with a helpless and equal bewilderment. He offered, “Pardon?”

“I thought you were named for him—you’re not,” she said, conclusions spooling out in front of her like an unravelled tooth, in hideous naked majesty of enamel and nerve. “My mechanism worked too well. It did not account for context. Ortus doesn’t come from a Lyctoral tradition. But what if hers did? What if we named her, accidentally, for him?”