Less than sixty seconds later you were curled up on the surface of the planetoid, half-dead with cold, trying to flush your extremities and dilate your blood vessels. Wading out of the River had never been a problem for you; you were always happy to go. The night-stricken planet had not reacted overmuch—you prided yourself on being the knife that cut silently—but the sandstorm had died as though arrested in midair. Particles that had been whipped miles up into the atmosphere were pattering down like rain. It grew exceedingly dark as the suns set in unison, and Mercy had clipped a little light to her ever-present clipboard as she wrote, which created a tiny corona of her pen, and the clipboard, and the softly falling sand.

A shaft of light fell on the dead beauty of the Body. She was always there, when you made the cut. She was always there to welcome you home from the abattoir. She thoroughly screwed up your peripheral vision: at times you panicked and speared her through, and she would only look at you with an unreadable, lifeless expression.

“One fewer for Number Seven to eat on the way in,” said the Saint of Joy. “Eight minutes thirty-four,” she added, because Mercy always lied when one thought she wasn’t going to, and never lied when one assumed she would, and mixed it up every so often to unbalance everyone further. “Not really good enough, Harrowhark.”

You swallowed down large quantities of icy saliva in the cold, in the dark. Within your helmet, frigid strands of hair had glued themselves to the back of your neck with sweat: you were going to need another haircut. You could not keep the querulous note out of your voice when you said, “That’s two minutes off my previous time, eldest sister.”

“Yes,” said the Lyctor, and you could imagine her focus behind the dark plex of her haz mask as she carefully drew another line on the graph she was plotting. “You’ve been improving rapidly. But you could take it down in four minutes, infant, and it would still be not really good enough.”

Your tongue slurred in your mouth: “Because these are so different from the real Resurrection Beast?”

“No,” said the Saint of Joy, and her voice took on the gossamer thinness of a razor blade, poisoned by being perfectly reasonable. “You could take it down in two. You could take it down in one. But what it boils down to, baby sister, is that you’ve got hypothermia and I don’t!”