‘You have no power here,’ she cries, raising her sword. All around Sister Evangeline, her Sisters echo the last three words. The daemons falter. They hiss and recoil. Some of them tumble to the deck, trailing ashes. The Sisters march forward as one.

‘Where we walk, so does He,’ Sister Evangeline says.

The daemons flicker momentarily, like candle flames pulled by the wind. The screaming wavers and then stops, and in the silence that follows, Sister Evangeline speaks once more. Her voice isn’t raised this time, but it carries just as clearly regardless, with all of the purity of prayer-time bells.

‘And under His eyes you will burn,’ she says.

And the remaining daemons hiss and recoil, their skin bubbling and sloughing away from their bones. They flap their wings and try to fly, but they cannot escape. The Sisters destroy the creatures utterly with blade edges and promethium flame and the holy detonations of bolt rounds. Their wrath is gold and thunder. It is blinding. Beautiful. I don’t want to drag my eyes away, but I have to, because beyond the second set of doors the Navigators are still screaming.

‘The Navigators,’ I shout to Zoric and Yumia. ‘Let’s go.’

But before we can reach the doors, a new sound splits the air. A slow shifting. A splintering, like old trees being felled, or a landslide beginning.

Like a field of glass, cracking underfoot.

I stop and look back, and this time it’s me who curses. ‘Saint’s blood,’ I say hollowly.

Something is growing from the deck of the Vow. From the ashes, blood and bone fragments. From all of that shattered glass. The Sisters fire on it as it twists together, shimmering and coated with warpfire, but it doesn’t break or weaken. It just soaks up the holy shells and the blessed flame like storm clouds swallow the sky. Then one large central eye opens in its chest. Eight more blink open in a circle all around it, lidless and staring and full of tiny lights that look all too much like stars.

DEATH IS COMING.

The words make my mind ache. Make my soul ache. They put me on my knees. Then I see what is reflected in the mirror-thing’s silver skin, and my heart aches, too. In every facet, and every fragment I see Sofika’s face, blood-spattered and staring. This isn’t the Sofika from my dreams, or from my past. It is my dream-taker as she is now. Coiled in the cables of her support machine, her pupils swollen and dark.

Ahri, she says, a thousand times over. Where are you?