No snow down here. Great icicles like stalactites seemed poised to crumble; oily pink webbing was strung from spike to spike, frosted up with cold. Drifts of broken glass and stagnant puddles of frozen fluid filled each corner, greeny-greyish in the dolorous buzzing overhead lights. Ropes of tube and ice hung over the entrances to each radiating passage in that nonagonal room, swagging over the signs that had once proclaimed each passage’s use. The only letters visible beneath the sluggish, pulsing viscera were a Y, the PR that had once heralded PRESERVATION, the AR once belonging to MORTUARY, and an almost-entirely obscured THREE. The crystal coffin in the centre of the room was misted thickly with cold that did not wipe off even when Lieutenant Dyas, a woman Harrow was beginning to grudgingly admit feared neither pain nor death after experiencing both, scrubbed at it with her sleeve. As such they could not see inside it, which was probably a relief.

The enormous old metal-rimmed whiteboard with its faded timetable and stained brown patches had been written over again. Harrowhark had startled when she first saw it:

END OF THE LINE. FALLING. OXYGEN CAN’T LAST THE DISTANCE AND WON’T REDIRECT POWER FROM THE PAYLOAD. INSTEAD I WILL MAKE YOU WATCH EVERY MOMENT AS I GET THE LAST PRIVILEGE YOU CANNOT ENJOY YOU BYGONE SON OF A BITCH.

I HOPE YOU’RE BOTH AS SORRY AS I AM.

She had said to Ortus, “I thought the messages were hallucinations, even though I never hallucinated like that before. It was easier to believe I was succumbing to the madness again.”

“Harrow,” he had said, “I have come to the conclusion that you were never mad … though who can be the judge of madness?”

It seemed so much worse to her if it wasn’t madness. She’d hate if it was under her control. She found herself saying curtly: “Then what?”

“The mind can only take so much pressure before it forms indentations,” he had said, meditatively. “It is strange—years and years after his death, I so often heard the sound … the way he pushed at the handle, the way he manipulated the haft … of my father, standing outside the door of my cell.”

Harrow had asked, “Did you miss him?”

He had thought about it. In the darkness of the big central room in that downstairs installation—the place he had never come to before, and that she felt she had left so much of herself inside, despite the fact that she had walked its metal-panelled halls for a few weeks only—he looked like an old statue, a Ninth House cavalier carved in the rock of some deep-set tomb.

And he had said thoughtfully, “Sometimes I imagined him coming back to life so that I might watch him die myself. The fantasy was a relief.”