“Why does it always come back to—my mother?” I said, my voice rising to a squeal like an emptying balloon. “Who are you? How the hell did you know my mother, who seemed like a real dick, by the way?”

“My name is Pyrrha Dve,” said the ghost in question. “Commander of the Second House, head of Trentham Special Intelligence, cavalier to a dead Lyctor. We compartmentalized from the Eightfold Word, just like you and your girl—though I’m an accident, and he took more from me than got taken from you. I was able to go underground, even from him. Two years before you were born, my necromancer started an affair with your mother … not knowing I’d also been doing the same thing, using his body.”

I said, “What the fuck.”

“She was the most dangerous woman I’d ever met who wasn’t me,” said Pyrrha Dve. “You’re right, though. She was a real dick.”

At this point I was beside myself and more or less demented, so I kind of just squawked: “But what do we do?!”

“No idea,” they—he—she said calmly. “I’d aim to get out of here alive, but our odds don’t look wonderful. If we stay put, we get squashed, or eaten. If we swim, we probably still get squashed or eaten. I heal quicker than a normal human being, but not that much quicker.”

Before I could just fundamentally lose my shit, Pyrrha suddenly sucked her breath in through her teeth, and said: “That’s your plan, Augustine?”

I pressed up to the plex. The River bumped into visual depth.

We were in a huge gyre, lit by the furious electric glow from the falling station. Outside—another kilometre down, maybe—was the pale belly of the River, studded with rocky promontories. And right at the bottom—the water was churning. The station tilted forward, and I could see clearly.

A hole had opened. It was big enough to swallow up the whole of Drearburh and have room to spare. It was a huge, hideous, dark expanse, and it had seething, weird edges; it took the lights pattering over them for me to see that the edges of the hole were enormous human teeth. Each one must’ve been six bodies high and two bodies wide, with the dainty scalloped edges of incisors. The teeth shivered and trembled, like the hole was slavering. And that hole had nothing in it; that hole was blacker than space, that hole was an eaten-away tunnel of reality.

And there—falling to its centre—wrestled the miniature figures of Augustine and the Emperor. Ianthe had separated from them somewhat, floating high above, though the nerve it must have taken to position herself above that tooth-serrated expanse forced me to reframe Ianthe Tridentarius in the wake of this absolutely galactic ballsiness.

“The stoma’s opened for John,” said Pyrrha, and she sounded—detached, rather than triumphant, rather than grief-stricken. “It must think he’s a Resurrection Beast.”