You held your flopping idiot’s head up, to look at her face again. For some reason—and you never needed a reason; you were very good at producing a reaction to no stimulus whatsoever—you became afraid. It was then that the Body emerged from behind the Lyctor’s shoulder, squatting somewhere close to the doors. Her sweet dead face floated a little behind the Lyctor’s. She looked at you with her heavy-lidded, yellow-gold eyes, and she said, quite clearly, with the voice of Aiglamene and your mother commingled:

“Lie, Harrow. Now.”

“Fifteen,” you said immediately, hoping your own meat would not betray you.

She pressed, “Counting from conception, or from birth?”

“Birth.”

That emotion played out over the face again, like the ripple of darkness across a briefly disturbed body of water. The whole body clenched and unclenched. It didn’t matter that she was a black hole to you, without thanergy or thalergy to speak of; it was just a matter of seeing her shoulders. It was relief. It was unalloyed, full-bore relief.

“Yuck,” she said.

The elevator came to a thudding halt. The doors behind the Lyctor opened; she stood, then looked down at you. The relief was gone; the distance remained.

“I have asked the Emperor multiple times why he has allowed himself to sit, exposed, for this long on the edge of the place he must not come back to,” she said. “And the reason turns out to be you. Some lost Ninth scrap who never had anything to do with anything … a nobody. But he acted so surprised … I said, Put an age requirement in the letter! I said, Everyone will be pubescent if you don’t! And now we reap what he sowed. Hiss.” (For a moment you thought you’d had an aural hallucination, that nobody who had lived ten thousand years—that nobody who had lived—would verbalise the word hiss.) “Well, you have three options: you can walk with me now to the shuttle, I can wheel you, or I can drag you. Which do you pick, you half-grown juvenile? I will tell you: the other one walked.”

You stood up. It cost you.

“Good,” she said, looking at you critically. “You look like a bat stuck in a birthday cake and you need at least two haircuts, but you are—you will be—you were—God’s breath, and God’s bones.”

The Lyctor rearranged your hood a little bit and smoothed out the shoulders of your robe—for this you vowed to one day take her dorsal nerve—then looked at the sword webbed into your arm, bent nearly double beneath its weight and your weariness. Her expression said quite clearly what she thought of it, but she had seen your naked face and perhaps seen something there. Perhaps your plans for her dorsal nerve.

“You’re not as pretty as Anastasia” was all she said.