“Call me by my full name, or don’t name me at all. I’ll be damned if I pass up the chance to hear you speak the words.”

The Emperor of the Nine Houses sighed.

“Commander Awake Remembrance of These Valiant Dead,” he said.

“All of it.”

“I can’t believe you feel like you’re in position to demand things of me.”

“All of it, Gaius!”

There was the preparatory sound of indrawn breath.

“Awake Remembrance of These Valiant Dead Kia Hua Ko Te Pai Snap Back to Reality Oops There Goes Gravity,” he recited, all in one breath. “Correct?”

“They’re dead words—a human chain reaching back ten thousand years,” said the corpse. “How did they feel?”

“Genuinely sad, bordering on very funny,” said God. “Can we talk?”

There was silence in that room. The tangled dead hair was very still. He said: “You’ve been trying to commit suicide by cop ever since I found you, Wake. I know when someone’s trying to get me to do something, and you’re acting like a woman who very much wants me to end her life.”

“Telepathy,” she said. “Did the ten billion give you that too?”

“Wish they had,” said the Emperor. “Wake, you’re acting like your mission’s over, and you want me to take you out of the equation.” Silence. “What was the mission?” Silence. “How did it end? What were you trying to do?”

“I’m not going to talk to you.”

“We both know that’s not true.”

A tiny ceramic clink. The Emperor was probably having tea. Ianthe stared into the middle distance, packing herself as tightly into the corner as possible. We shared the corner with a white robe on a hook, and she actually wormed herself behind the robe, like we were playing hide-and-seek. So I did too, and had to watch whatever the fuck was going on through a thin veil of robe, next to Ianthe, so please feel some sympathy for me here.

He said, “Blood of Eden died with you, Wake. Any further action is just agonal breathing.”

“We both know that’s not true.”

“You never would have fired nukes into my fleet.”

“Yeah, you know a hell of a lot about me,” said the corpse. “Perhaps almost as much as I know about you.”

“There’s a lot I don’t know about you,” said God. There was a brief flash of him moving through the robes—he had stood. I caught an elbow, and an arm holding a mug; he was leaning against some chair a little way out of sight. “There’s a lot I want to know. Why the Ninth House all those years ago, Wake? There’s nothing there.”