‘No, I didn’t. I just wanted to make it right.’

I take a breath. Force the words up from inside me.

‘But I failed,’ I tell them. ‘Just like on Hellebore. I led myself down the wrong path. Saw what I wanted to see. I let her get hurt, all over again.’

Yumia shakes her head, her dark eyes unchanging. ‘It sounds like truth,’ she says. ‘But it always does. There is no way to be sure.’

‘Yes there is,’ Zoric says, and then he looks at me. ‘Swear it,’ he says. ‘Swear that you didn’t know about the witch.’

I stare into his pale eyes. ‘I swear it.’

Zoric nods slowly. His pale eyes soften with sorrow. ‘Let her go, Mia,’ he says. ‘She’s telling the truth.’

‘How can you be sure?’ she asks.

‘Because she swore her heart to Sofika,’ he says. ‘And she doesn’t break vows.’

Yumia’s eyes soften too, then. She drops her dart from my throat and her hands from my shoulders.

‘I need you both to get me close enough to save her,’ I tell them. ‘To kill that thing that took her.’

Both of them nod and help me heave myself away from the statue at my back. My vision dizzies, and my body floods with heat. I am certain that I have torn my stitches and reopened old wounds, but it hardly seems to matter now. Nothing does, save for Sofika.

‘If we survive this, then I’ll consider your service done,’ I tell them. ‘All debts paid. I’ll give you a clean slate and let you go back to your lives.’

Yumia unslings her darts. ‘But these are our lives,’ she says. ‘There are no clean slates.’

Zoric loads a new magazine into the Valedictor and racks the slide. ‘And there’s no going back, either.’

There’s nothing I can think to say to that. To them. Not after all they’ve done, and all I’ve done to them. So instead I hold up my hand. I take a breath. Count to three, then I turn back out into the fight.

Into the storm. It has grown larger now, as if buoyed by the bloodshed. Impossible rain lashes my face, a gale tearing at my hair and my clothes. The Battle Sisters and the Heretic Astartes are engaged in battle. Bolters howl and flamers roar as the Dominions brace and fire, their special weapons doing little more than slowing the Thousand Sons. The Heretic Astartes keep coming even with their armour punctured and punched through and burning. They crash against the Battle Sisters, armour against armour. I see one of the Heretic Astartes take hold of a Battle Sister by the throat, lifting her clear of the ground. The Battle Sister drives her chainsword up through the heretic’s throat even as the Thousand Son breaks her neck. They crash to the ground together, trailing blood and dust.