"You shouldn’t have done this," he said. "You shouldn’t have used us like this. You used us hard. You had no right." He lifted the mask, faltered under it. He hated how he sounded. "You killed them. Probably me too. It was… Was an honour to run with you." He heard what must be grapples. Militia climbing. He heard them shout the Mayor’s name. "You shouldn’t have done this. I’m glad you… you got what you wanted. Shouldn’t have done it this way, but we got what we meant to, too." He lowered the mask to his shoulders and tried to effect some militant salute, but Toro was not looking at him.

When the helmet settled it lightened. It felt like cloth. He had no talent for thaumaturgy, but even he could feel the metal thick with it. He looked through crystal that lightened the room, brought edges clear; he pulled the buckles tight under his shoulders, felt himself enhanced.

He gasped. Little needles spoked into his neck; his fingers gripped the metal. The sacrifice, the blood to power this iron head. How do I do this? he tried to shout. He felt extrusions of metal under his teeth and tried to bite or push them one way or another, feeling them still wet with the woman’s spit. His voice dinned in his own ears.

Push. Ori stood as he had seen her do and shoved with new-powerful thighs, jerked forward, staggered, balanced, tried again. He braced the tips of the horns against the wall and strained and only embedded them in the wood. People were running toward the door. Push, she had said. Where am I pushing to?

In his eagerness, his desperate sudden want to be alive, he reached for an urgency, envisioned his home, his little room. He thought of it and alchemised the want into a focus, and when he ploughed forward again he clenched his eyes and teeth and felt the hankering coalesce in two blistering nodes where the horns met his forehead, and he pushed again and felt something catch, a sensual rupture like splitting taut wax paper. He gasped, and the substance of the air began to part for him and like water tension it tried to draw him in.

Ori paused at the edge of the little ontic abomination, the hole, while the universe strained. Ahead of him was distressed darkness. He twisted, keeping the horns in the wound he had made, and tried to catch the eyes of the woman with the child’s arms playing pat-a-cake on her cheeks. She did not look at him. She did not look at the corpses she had made.