‘We have her,’ Ashava says, cutting through my thoughts. ‘Go to Qi-Oh.’

I tear my eyes from Eugenia and all of that blood and manage to nod, before limping across the stain on the deck to where Qi-Oh lies. A circle of her own blood surrounds her. Her armour is a smoking ruin, ruptured at the waist where the daemonglass pierced it. She is so pale and still that I am certain she must be dead, but then her hazel eye flickers open and she takes a great, ragged breath.

‘Stand,’ I say.

Qi-Oh coughs and rolls onto her side, one hand clamped over that wound in her abdomen. Then she struggles to her knees. To her feet. She looks past me. Around me.

‘You killed it,’ she says, her voice a blood-wet rasp.

‘Not just me,’ I reply. ‘Ashava and Eugenia. Haskia. We killed it together.’

She swallows. It looks as though it hurts her.

‘But not me,’ she says.

‘You broke the line.’

‘They were dying,’ she says raggedly. ‘Calyth. Veridia. Joti. Sarita and Munari. They were being torn apart in the lowdecks by those they swore to protect. I saw it in the crystals, and I know that you did too. Yet you asked me to ignore it. To ignore them.’

‘I did not ask you anything,’ I tell her. ‘I gave you an order.’

‘To leave my Sisters to die,’ she says.

Her words cut as deeply as the daemonglass did.

‘They are my Sisters too,’ I tell her. ‘My responsibility.’

Qi-Oh stares at me. ‘And yet you would not go to them,’ she says.

She makes to walk away from me, then, but I take hold of her by the arm.

‘Daemons lie, Qi-Oh, you know this. It showed you those things with the intent to turn your heart against you, and you let it.’

Qi-Oh’s cheeks colour with the blood that is left to her. Her hazel eye is alight with fury.

‘And if it is not a lie?’ she asks. ‘What then?’

I think about it for the sparest of seconds. About the hollowness at the heart of me growing larger.

‘Then that will be my responsibility too,’ I tell her.

Ravara

RAVARA

The walls of the Chamber Awaiting are running with ribbons of impossible colour. Frost and fire play across every surface, casting everything in dancing, intermittent light. Where the two elements meet, the iron bones of the ship melt like candlewax. Silvery gobbets of it slough away, raining down all around us with a series of irregular thumps like the beating of a struggling heart.

I move through the mess towards the Chamber of Sail, with Zoric and Yumia at my side. We are all breathing hard, winded by wounding and by what the mirror-thing showed us. The whispering is even louder in here, but I can hear Sofika’s words anyway, playing on repeat between my ears like a corrupted recording.

Where are you, Ahri?