Everyone nods and sets to busying themselves with consulting the texts and scrolls. My Sisters pore over prayer scrolls and verses while Silvera and Ravara talk in low voices about the use of iron to make gates, and the setting of stepped paths in stone. About the Mark of Martyrs. I search through histories, and records of building, and battle. I read the apocryphal tales of the Renouncement. Of Thor, and the Confederation of Light. Of the Great Defence of 858, which made an icon of Sister Amelda of the Bloody Rose. Time ticks on, and the rain lashes against the spire. Lightning flashes. The servitors turn their scrolls and the cherubim hum and time still ticks on, but I find nothing of the ninety-nine steps, or the iron-wrought gate. I find nothing to tell me where to find the Shield.

I close the last of the tomes on my side of the table, my hand lingering on the cover. Ashava pauses in her work beside me.

‘Anything?’ she asks, in a low voice.

I shake my head, because I cannot bring myself to say it. She folds closed the book in front of her, and puts her hand flat on top of mine.

‘Adelynn told you that you had the answer,’ she says. ‘Perhaps we are all looking in the wrong place.’

‘Or looking too hard,’ Eugenia says.

Qi-Oh nods. ‘Frustration does nothing but quiet His guidance.’

‘He wants you to find the Shield, Eva,’ Ashava says. ‘Not me, or us. Not Elivia, or these others. You.’

‘But I do not know where to begin,’ I reply.

‘You do,’ Sarita says.

‘You just don’t know it yet,’ says Munari.

‘Listen to your heart,’ Veridia says. She puts her fingertips to the steel plate in her scalp. ‘The mind can fail you. It can be changed or broken, but the heart cannot. That is where the God-Emperor truly rests.’

I hesitate, wavering under the weight of their expectations, and everyone else’s. Of my own. Ashava squeezes my hand tightly. Her eyes are full of warmth.

‘He chose you, Eva,’ she says. ‘And so did she.’

I take a deep breath of the cool, smokeless Archivia air, and nod. Ashava lets go of my hand as I turn back to the table. To the vast, sprawling map of Dimmamar’s south-western cathedral quarter. Almost thirty thousand square kilometres of city, rendered painstakingly in ink and leaf. I walk around the map’s edge, taking in the spires and the slums. The cathedra and the avenues. The pilgrims’ paths and workhalls. I do not think. I do not question. I just keep walking until I reach the far side of the table. Until I recognise a shape made by the buildings and the roads. The same shape that I bear around my eyes, that has started to burn again under the Archivia’s yellow lighting.