You had seen a Lyctor’s eyes only once before. Lyctors kept their own faces, but the eyes they stole from someone else. You had been lucky that your own transition was not as startling. This pair of eyes were a slumbrous, sand-tinted hazel with grey-madder clouds within them, like a red hurricane moving over a gaseous mantle, like a storm-ridden planet of red dust. The expression did not match these dreamy and quite beautiful eyes: the expression was paralytically repellent in ways that had nothing to do with your dorsal nerve. It saw right through you, marked what you had done, and let you know that there would be a reckoning. No signs of age touched the corners of those screwed-up, dust-storm eyes, but nonetheless it was a gaze as elderly as Crux’s. There was something in the look she gave you—after she read the whole of your features, as though searching—that puzzled you. Then fell the final indignity. She hooked her finger into the seam of your hood and tugged it down to your neck, so that she could look at your whole face without permission, bloodied skull and all.

You flushed until the tips of your ears were red hot. Fear and humiliation formed a bone hook at the back of your superior articular facet; acrimonious rage drove it forward, caught the loop, and withdrew it backward, as though unknitting your nerves. The scythe of pain that swept over the back of your scalp nearly made you sick again, and you would have been if you had not of late become the Saint of Emesis. You squeezed the nerve flat with the muscles around it and wedged the minute hook back into your spinal mass where it belonged. This resulted in a whole-body case of pins and needles so profound that all you could do was thrash like a fish on the end of a line. The finger was withdrawn. The stormy eyes widened, just fractionally. An emotion was playing out over her face that was—not unfamiliar to you—but nonsensical; you discarded it.

“You oughtn’t to have done that,” she said. “You might have blown out your dorsal nerve and asphyxiated.”

She looked at your face and saw what was so nakedly writ there: disbelief that she could perceive what you’d done. “No, I cannot sense you,” she said, in answer to your unspoken dismay. “But your body is not a mystery to me. I may know it better than you do, you—you Ninth baby.” You were fumbling with the hood with clumsy hands, hiding your face. “How old are you?” she asked abruptly. “How old in years?”