“But it was only—”

“The once? Yes, one evening planned down to the ground for five hundred years,” said the Saint of Patience. He lit the end of the cigarette. “Dios apate, major. We needed your, ahem, genetic material, and it was the only way. It was the first time Joy and I had been in the same place for ten years. You were so damned careful, John. No vulnerabilities, no lapses. You’d have become paranoid if we’d—gone a second round. Good Lord, it all sounds so coarse. I imagine I might be hurting your feelings. God, I hope so. Right now, I find I hope so tremendously.”

“It’s impossible. I won’t believe this. How could you even—”

“Mercymorn,” said Augustine matter-of-factly.

“I didn’t even—”

“Mercymorn,” repeated Augustine. He took a drag from his cigarette and said, “Sorry, Gid, didn’t actually want you to know all the scummy details … Cig?”

“I’d kill for one,” said Gideon, original flavour.

There was more silence in that room as the Saint of Patience lit another cigarette and passed it to the Saint of Duty. Cytherea’s empty corpse lay still and silent in its chair. The Emperor was staring at the crown of her head, probably where the bullet had exited, which I could not see. The other Lyctor leaned against the wall, staring into a shuttered window.

“So what,” said the Emperor, “Gideon—you tossed Wake out the airlock—she and the baby died en route?”

“No,” said Mercymorn thinly. “It didn’t.”

I pushed out of the robes. Ianthe tried to reach for me; I slapped her hand away. It was seven steps out of that little foyer to the centre of the room where the Emperor sat. I stood, breathing hard, my battered two-hander clutched in your hands, not knowing what to do with your arms, and not knowing what to do with your face. There was this huge, insane roaring in your ears, like close-up electrical static, and it was like I was watching us move from outside—as though we were both out of the driver’s seat, Nonagesimus, and someone else was in there.

But nobody else had their hands on the controls. It was just me.

Everyone turned to look at us. Nobody said a word. I stood behind the chair with the dead body in it, a dark hole at the back of its neck. The cigarettes made thin grey ghosts curl up toward the light.

“I’m—” I said.

The world revolved.

“I’m not fucking dead,” I said, which wasn’t even true, and I was choking up; everything I’d ever done, everything I’d ever been through, and I was choking up.