‘I would be honoured to hear it,’ I tell her.

Eugenia smiles slightly. ‘I was born on a dying world,’ she says. ‘It was called Illuminance because of the precious metals once buried there. Gold and silver and platinum. By the time I was born, though, the metals were all but gone, leaving behind empty hollows. The great caverns and tunnels and open pits where we made our homes.’

‘The spaces left that showed you what once existed,’ I say softly.

‘Yes, Sister Superior. Just so.’ Eugenia nods. ‘Few people remained on Illuminance. Our livings were made trading what little the world could offer. Most died young, from sickness or starvation, or from collapse in the caves.’

‘It sounds a hard life,’ I say. ‘One blessed by suffering.’

She nods. ‘Was it so where you were raised?’

‘I was raised on Ophelia VII,’ I say. ‘It was my home even before the convents. My childhood was spent amongst the spires, and the saints.’

Eugenia tilts her head. ‘But there was suffering,’ she says.

I think of the cold tiers of the spires and that terrible, harsh winter in my tenth year. I think of my mother’s swollen, permanently ink-stained fingers and my father’s yellowed eyes.

Of the sound of them both coughing, late at night.

‘There was,’ I say. ‘But I would hear your history before I speak my own.’

Eugenia nods before continuing.

‘Not everyone on Illuminance saw our suffering as a blessing,’ she says. ‘My mother and father resented it. They had lost everything because of our world’s decline. Their wealth, their privilege. Power. They used to say there was no light left to be found on Illuminance.’ She shakes her head. ‘But there were those amongst us who held faith. In the past, the labourers had been permitted to keep just a little of Illuminance’s gold, and they had made that gold into an icon of the God-Emperor. That is where the elders would take prayer. I would go with them, though my mother and father would not, because I could not see how things would ever get better unless we strove for it. Unless we prayed.’

Eugenia’s eyes go distant as she remembers.

‘The statue was five times my height and stood in the oldest of the caverns, where the ceiling was high enough to seem like a sky, and the cave-water would feel like rain on our skin.’

‘It sounds beautiful,’ I say.

She nods, again. ‘It was. I felt whole there. Hopeful. So I would go and I would pray every night after my labours were complete, but though I felt happy I never once heard the God-Emperor’s voice. When I told the elders so, they smiled and said that it was not a voice I was looking for, but a sign. I was just a child then, and I did not understand. When I told them so, they smiled again and told me that I would, in time.’

This time her words have more than just weight. They settle on me like the cloak at my back.