It was now obvious that the station was crawling with those things. You were gone, and I did not know where the fuck you were. Our only real options were to stay and fight, or go and fight: the place wasn’t getting any less filled up with wasps. And it was hotter all the time, especially in that room with the steaming piles of revenant bees.

You didn’t have any gloves. You didn’t have any armour. When I took off your robe, which was just puke rags by then, I found you were wearing a whole bunch of bones on your skin for no apparent reason. I was sorry to take them off in case they were any use at all, but whatever necromantic noise you’d used to fix them to yourself wasn’t working, and they were making it even harder to extend your arms. So I closed my eyes and I reached under your shirt and I peeled them all off, and I tied your hair back and took your sword and left. I didn’t look, and I barely touched you. Don’t get mad.

There were other sounds echoing down the halls by then. I know the clash of swords on bone when I hear it. There was that huge, murmurous buzzing of invading Heralds, and there were more of those baying, bleating screeches, but there was also the absolutely fucking unmistakable sound of rapier work. The alarm cawed overhead. I didn’t run, but I legged it pretty quickly down the corridor, and then, beneath the alarm, I became aware of yet another sound: someone was screaming.

In a fork off the hallway, I found the source. Dead Heralds lay in an untidy semicircle around the last living, rearing member of their gang, and fighting this bee—screaming her head off—was Lemon-mouth Prime: the Lyctor you called Mercymorn.

She was shrieking, drunk and howling off pure fright, every so often lunging in the wrong direction as though she couldn’t see straight. I came into the room, not knowing what to do, not knowing how to help her. Despite the screaming, she was holding her own—her rapier was a steel needle flashing in and out, out of the way of the snapping jaws of the Herald, thrusting into the black eye socket in a shower of jelly. There were long, shining folds of a net wrapped around her offhand arm, but the net was not in her hand. She missed a thrust, nothing but wing, and then she drove herself into the Herald and laid that bare hand on its skull. And the Herald just kind of imploded.