And the Emperor of the Nine Houses, the Necrolord Prime, stood from his chair to look at you—at me; looked at my face, looked at your face, looked at my eyes in your face. It took, maybe, a million myriads. The static in your ears resolved into wordless screaming. His expression was just—gently quizzical; mildly awed.

“Hi, Not Fucking Dead,” he said. “I’m Dad.”

51

WHEN I WAS, LIKE, six years old, I used to play a game trying to pick out my mum’s skeleton from the crowd—I’d choose a skeleton that I thought was her and hang out in the snow-leek fields, watching them endlessly breaking rocks into gravel, watching them winnow through the mulch. I used to pretend that whatever construct I’d picked knew I was watching, and would send me subtle messages. Hoe thrust into the ground three times in a row with a pause after, that was hello, because that wouldn’t happen so often that it would beggar belief. When I was seven the captain broke it to me that my mother wasn’t even in rotation yet. She only got boiled and sent out when I was eight.

Do you remember the time when we were little and I told you to stop fucking picking on me, because what if my other mum or dad was, like, important? I remember. You said, what’s the evidence, and I said what’s the … not evidence, and you said why would it matter anyway, and I said why would it not matter anyway, and you said I was an idiot, and we whaled on each other for a while. Then I said, what if someone came looking for me and said, “It’s me, the most important guy in the world, here’s the long-lost baby I was looking for, everyone will stop treating her like shit henceforth, also I am going to murder everyone in here for what they have done and Crux goes first,” and you told me that if anyone came looking for me you would get your parents to lock me in a closet and say that I had died of “brain malfunction,” which I now know isn’t a real disease, so I bet you feel stupid now?

You were furious. You said, It doesn’t matter who they are—they’re not important, and they’re not coming for you.

I used to sit by my mother’s niche and catch her up on everything. Things like: Aiglamene says I’ve fixed my hand placement when I block and pivot from the lower left. Things like: Harrowhark was a giant bitch today. (Told her that on the reg.) Things like: I can do ninety-six sit-ups in two minutes now. Absolute fourteen-year-old bullshit. Serious A-grade drivel.