It was worse when I was a kid. I remember the time you caught me telling her, I love you, and I can’t even remember what you said, but I remember that I had you on your back—I put you straight on the fucking ground. I was always so much bigger and so much stronger. I got on top of you and choked you till your eyes bugged out. I told you that my mother had probably loved me a lot more than yours loved you. You clawed my face so bad that my blood ran down your hands; my face was under your fucking fingernails. When I let you go you couldn’t even stand, you just crawled away and threw up. Were you ten, Harrow? Was I eleven?

Was that the day you decided you wanted to die?

You remember how the fuck-off great-aunts always used to say, Suffer and learn?

If they were right, Nonagesimus, how much more can we take until you and me achieve omniscience?

“And now we come to the heart of the matter,” said the Lyctor you called Mercymorn.

She had stood up next to us—and God looked at me, and at her, and at me, and held my gaze. It was this that pinned us in place. When those white rings hovered on someone else, the blood rushed back to your brain; when they flickered back to me, I went white and blank again, mute and stupid, a floating outline.

He looked at us, and he rubbed one of his temples as though he had a headache. And he said, with an enormous sigh: “Ah. The eyes.”

“Yes, the eyes,” she said. “Your child … Alecto’s eyes.”

A ripple of ice over the face. A hardening of the mouth. He said quietly, “Don’t call her—”

“Alecto! Alecto! Alecto!” repeated Mercy shrilly. The other Lyctors flinched each time she said it, as though it were an aural stab. “John, you are trying to start a fight with me to get out of the fight I am trying to have with you, which is a painfully domestic tactic. Those are A.L.’s eyes, Lord … right there in your genetic code.”

“There could be any number of explanations,” said God calmly.

“Yes,” said Augustine. He tapped his cigarette out into the emptied cup of tea. “There could be. You’ve offered us explanations for everything over the years. But—some of them didn’t hold up on examination … It was the power I could never get my head around, you know? I follow power back to its source, John. It’s the skill you asked me to perfect. And the longer I looked at yours, the less things added up.”