“Let’s go to a better question,” I said, and I raised my sword in your hands. “You know we already killed one Lyctor, right? Me and Harrow? You know we’ve practised?”

“Oh, shut up, Harrow’s cavalier,” she said hysterically. “I’m trying to think. You’re not her—she isn’t driving you—but you have her eyes. Why? When they showed me your corpse I didn’t think to check the eyes. Stupid, Mercy. Oversight. I thought I knew what you were, though I didn’t want to believe it…”

I said, “What the fuck are you talking about?”

“I am talking about the failure of the Ninth House operation,” she said.

And she cocked her flower-coloured head to the side so that her sweaty hair fell over her face, in that sizzling, gulping heat, and she stared at us, and she said in tones that were almost sedate: “I thought the commander had simply been a bad girl … a workaholic, putting business before family. She was the type … but that would have been too much of a coincidence. Let me think. Let me think. I made her the dolls—they were perfect—and then she must have played silly buggers with—with the emission,” she said, suddenly, impassioned. “Of course it killed her! She was always arrogant! That moron knew Gideon was on her tail!”

Something in your head went spang when we heard my name. It sounded strangely gloopy at first, unreal, as though we were underwater. But then the pain went away.

The Lyctor continued, those weird reddish-haze eyes scrunched up as though she might cry: “And then Gideon ruined everything,” she said. “Then the commander ruined everything. Then you ruined everything. This could have been over eighteen years ago. But now it’s messy … now I have to take the River all the way home and fight my way through Anastasia’s horrid tomb cult just because the commander always thought she was so smart. Don’t know why Gideon was so obsessed with her … he never cared about beauty, and she was repellent to talk to.”

I did not know what the fuck to say to this incoherent spew. She said, ragged, peevish: “What? No tongue in your head, you—you mutant, you mistake, you great big calf-eyed fuck-up? I need to think. I need to think. Why are those eyes now in your face? Unless…”

And then, of all goddamn things, her voice caught in a great, shuddery sob. She paced backward and forward. At one point, she threw her head back as though she were going to yell aloud, and that weird-hued hair shivered over her back. But she said nothing, just stood in the pit of the light, and then she turned back to us.