The Emperor was wading toward you through this bobbing array of dead. He was saying something you paid no particular attention to: “Harrow, it’s not real. Only you can see what you’re seeing, and everything inside the shuttle is illusion. It’s the River. The River is a predator—the dead are in your brain. It’s trying harder with you because you’re fundamentally deeper in it than Ianthe. I didn’t think you’d be able to go this deep, first time in, but you have. Walk back toward me.”

“Two minutes remaining,” said Mercy. And: “They are coming for the source of the noise. I stood on the bank and watched Cassiopeia die, Teacher—”

“—do not rev that engine, Mercymorn—”

“She led them away from the brain; I was there in projection, and I saw when they seized her legs and arms … I was laying stakes for the Beast, and I was there, and I thought to myself, Lord, But what will we do with your ceramics collection? There is so much of it.”

You pressed your hands to your face and were startled all over again that you could not close your eyes. When you pressed the lids down, the light changed, and—you recalled this, as though you had done it before—you lost visual complexity. The shuttle was gone, but the water was not, and the bodies were everywhere. You were lost in a deep aperture. Hot bloody blisters bubbled up from your skin, and you were aware of yourself, not as a structure, but as a sickly radiance: one sickly radiance among other sickly radiances, one, two, three, four, five, all around you, one beneath. The distant scream coalesced. You realised it was coming from you.

Your eyes opened. You looked at the blanketing bodies of the dead children of the Ninth House, were aware of yourself as an ova cluster of two hundred pinpricks of light. You were a sigil: you were an intermingled fire. The fluid was sucked from your sinus cavities, and with it your brain, soon disassembled. You were made small. You were a throat, you were an oven. The water was boiling hot and your skin was sloughing off you in reddened, shrinking frills; those pinpricks boiled within you, and the bodies boiled without—you were a hunger without a stomach. You felt the thanergetic pit inside the coffin, the curve of a childlike jaw, the pallid bow of a dead mouth. You did not understand yourself as standing, nor understood yourself as walking, but you were doing both. You were dying in that hot water; whatever wanted your meat suit could have it.

“Harrowhark,” said God. “Over here—over here, kid. I daren’t touch you. Come toward me. Toward me—Mercy, as you love me, do not push that button.”

“Thirty seconds,” said Mercymorn, and quietly: “Lord, you doom your Houses.”