Her throat was working. “Augustine—”

The Lyctor took her silently in his arms: they held each other like children who’d had a nightmare and had woken in a fright. Just as silently, they detached.

She said in a low voice, “He was right. There can be no forgiveness.”

“Then let us not seek out forgiveness, but forgetfulness,” he said. “Bury me next to you in that unmarked grave, Joy. We knew that was the only hope we ever had—that we would live to see it through … and pray for our own cessation. Oh, we’ll still hate each other, my dear, we have hated each other too long and too passionately to stop … but my bones will rest easy next to your bones.”

Augustine raised his head, for the first time, to look out at his frozen audience, of which probably the most animated member was Cytherea’s body, which my mum had completely abandoned.

“No retribution, Gideon?” he remarked. His face was deathly livid. His features were still, but his hands were not. “I thought you might want to burn on his pyre.”

I opened my mouth to speak; I was startled when the raw-looking man wearing my sunglasses said, “No.”

“I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t surprised,” Augustine said, “but also lying if I said I wasn’t pleased. Here we three are at the end … Alpha, beta, and gamma.”

Gideon stared at the dead cigarette in his hand, and then he said, “Well. Augustine, there’s something you should know—”

White light.

It bleached the insides of your nose and the back of your throat. It hurt coming out your ears. It bled out your eyeballs. It wasn’t a flash of light, more … a suddenness; when it was gone—as though it hadn’t even existed, but had been a luminous hallucination—time stopped.

That light took colour from the room—everyone was a slow-motion cavalcade of greys, of eyes caught widening, of mouths parting in stone-shaded articulations of shock. I’d tried to turn us around like there was a grenade to fall on—and then, in that thousand-shaded grey, I saw—the red.

Powdery particles were resolving in the air—they were emerging from my mouth, shaking free from Ianthe’s hair. First a softly tinted pale colour like a sunrise pink, then deepening to cherry colour, then to deep scarlet. They floated in midair, hesitatingly, and then inexorably travelled to one point, like dust motes beneath a ray of sunshine. A great stripping wind blew through the room like a scourge, whipping those motes up in a crimson vortex. The powder became a grit; the grit became an aggregate; and then that hot red matter resolved into bone.