‘There is such a thing as too humble, you know,’ Munari says.
‘The verses would beg to differ,’ Sarita replies, and she pushes gently at her twin’s shoulder with the flat of her hand. ‘Besides, what about you, little sister?’
‘Little,’ Munari says, shaking her head now. ‘You say that as if there’s a candlewick between us.’
‘Fourteen minutes is much more than a candlewick,’ Sarita says. She is smiling now that their roles are reversed. ‘If you must bring up the Cult of Drowning, then perhaps I should speak of the Bladed Wastes.’
Munari blushes. ‘That is different.’
Sarita looks at me. ‘It isn’t,’ she says. ‘Munari was the one who led the train of pilgrims across the Bladed Wastes on Vilium to keep them from the teeth and knives of the drukhari. The xenos came upon the train five times, and every time they did, Munari killed their reavers and raiders. She did not lose a single soul. Not one.’
Sarita’s eyes soften as she looks at her sister.
‘If you have come here seeking a truth, Evangeline, then that is the one I would give you. Munari is selfless, and strong. She will serve you well.’
Her voice is serious, now. No more laughter. Munari must recognise this because her eyes soften, too. A perfect mirror for those of her twin.
‘Not as well as you,’ she says.
They clasp hands for a moment, and I find that I have to look away because it is not just sentences that Sarita and Munari share, but everything. They are one heart, cast in two bodies. Each completely defined by the other. It makes me think even more about the things I have lost. About what it would mean if one of them were to die under my watch.
‘Are you all right, Sister Superior?’ Sarita asks.
Munari nods. ‘You seem troubled.’
I look at them in turn, and try not to think about them dying.
‘I am sorry,’ I tell them. ‘But I have to go. Thank you for your stories.’
They smile and nod and I leave them to keep to their patrol, matching each other’s stride and pace perfectly and talking in their low, warm voices.
Each completely defined by the other.
I meet with Veridia at the spinal viewport as the Vow’s shutters close in preparation for our first jump towards the Throneworld.
‘I am afraid I have little to offer you in the way of truths, Sister Superior,’ she says, as the shutters grind inexorably downwards. ‘I lost most of mine when I gained this.’
She puts her fingertips to the steel plate that dominates one side of her skull.
‘I remember who I am, and how I am, but not how I came to be.’
‘Do you remember how it happened?’ I ask her.
She frowns on the side of her face that still can. ‘Only because others told me,’ she says. ‘I took the injury in the commandery’s last battle before being called home to Ophelia VII. We were suppressing a heretic uprising in the border worlds of the Segmentum Pacificus.’