But as everything went black and I died the second time round, I didn’t see you. I didn’t even see me. The final thing I saw was a great sunshiny light: a blurred figure, hazing in and out around the edges. At first it looked to me like a woman—a grey-faced, dead-eyed woman, with a face so beautiful it almost went out the other side and became repellent; a woman with my eyes, dimmed dark yellow in death, whose hair fell in wet leaden hanks. I realised with exhausted indignation that, at the end of everything—after all I had been through—after the last word, the last strike, the last drop of blood in the water—your bullshit dead girlfriend had come to claim you.

And she said in the wrong voice twice removed: “Chest compressions. I know her sternum’s shattered; ignore it. We need that heart pumping. On my mark.”

Hands pressed. We died.

53

HALF AN HOUR AGO

“YOU’RE SURE,” HARROWHARK SAID.

“Of course I’m not sure,” said Dulcie Septimus. “But I’m a necromancer of the Seventh House—or I was, when I was alive. Abigail couldn’t have felt what I felt, when we both looked outside. I’m not an expert with revenant spirits, but I know a little something about puppeting. And your body’s not being puppeted, Harrow—something is moving it around, and not a fragment. It’s not the ghost either, because it didn’t feel anything like the Sleeper.”

Those blue eyes watched her very carefully as she stared, unseeing, at the facility walls: at them buckling beneath the enormous pressure from above, the whole castle doing a neat controlled demolition on itself. Folding up and changing, as though caught in the grip of a giant fist.

The rips at the side—the huge rents of wall and partition—had begun to alter in a way she had seen before. They no longer looked out into darkness; they looked out into the same white, hard absence of place and time that she had seen within another bubble. A tintless, abyssal wound; her mind’s contraction; her limits within the River.

“It may mean nothing,” said Dulcie.

Harrowhark heard herself asking distantly, “Why did you tell me?”

That rueful smile again, like the shadow of old joy.

“Because I wanted you to know all the truth,” said the dead daughter of the Seventh. “The whole, unpackaged, slipshod truth. Truth unvarnished and truth unclean. Pal and I were always zealots, in that line. I got told so many lies over my life, Harrowhark, and I didn’t want to go back into the River having myself committed the murder of the white lie. Please understand, I’m being selfish. But I wanted you to know.”

When she looked into Harrow’s face again, and how it had changed, she said simply: “I’m sorry.”

“There’s a difference between keeping a shred of dance card,” said Harrow Nonagesimus, “and saving the last dance.”