‘I was spared, too,’ I say softly. ‘Not just on the Last of Days, but before then.’

‘That is the suffering you spoke of,’ Eugenia says.

I nod. ‘I was born in the cardinal city’s Administratum quarter,’ I tell her. ‘My mother and father were sixth generation quintus-graded scribes. They recorded the histories of the Sororitas orders.’

‘Then they were people of faith,’ Eugenia says.

I smile. ‘Everyone on Ophelia VII is a person of faith,’ I tell her. ‘But yes. Our habitation chamber was small, but spare. We had little, but wanted for nothing.’ My smile fades. ‘Until my tenth year, when a blight swept the spire. Something that caught in the lungs. Over half the spire succumbed to it within a week. The hospitallers and the medicae could not cure it, nor could they slow it, so the spire was quarantined to allow the sickness to burn itself out.’

I shake my head. ‘All three of us contracted the sickness, but it affected my mother and father much more keenly than it did me. Their work quotas dropped and dropped until they could not work at all, and I took to caring for them. Even then, as ill as she was, my mother would still sing to me. She would still allow me my favourite story.’

‘Which story was that?’ Eugenia asks.

‘The Martyrdom of Saint Katherine,’ I say, remembering the way my mother would tell it. No grand words. Just a simple, reverent retelling of the saint’s glorious death and of what it meant to her followers. ‘When the story was done, my mother would blow out all of the candles save for one in memory of Katherine’s fiery heart. I would watch the light until I fell asleep. When I woke, I always expected it to have burnt out overnight, but the candle would always keep its fire.’

‘Just like the saint’s heart.’

I nod. ‘On the fourteenth day of quarantine, I woke to find that my fever had broken. That I could breathe easily again. I went to tell my mother and father only to find that they had passed in their sleep. It took another five days for the quarantine to lift, and for the mistresses of the spire’s orphanage to come and find me.’

‘You stayed with your mother and father all that time,’ Eugenia says softly.

‘Yes, and I lit the candle every night, just as my mother had. When the mistresses took me to the orphanage to train in my family’s trade I tried to do the same, but they forbade it. So I spent my days in service and my nights in darkness, but after just a few weeks I started to dream, for the first time in my life.’

‘What did you dream of?’ Eugenia asks.

‘Of standing alone in a vast darkness, carrying a single candle. Of a path to follow, that ended at iron gates made in the saint’s image.’

Eugenia’s dark eyes are wide, and rapt. ‘Like those at the Convent Sanctorum,’ she says.