I’ve put words down on paper, tens of thousands of them, more words than there are worlds with names, and if you’ve followed my red scribblings this far – and made allowance for what happened to my hand – then you’ll have some notion of all the things that had happened to me since I last saw my sister. I’d watched her being taken on the Monetta, dragged away from me on the other side of a door, and I’d suffered all the weeks after that not knowing if she was still alive. I’d seen the decimation of Rack’s crew, the unkind business Bosa had wrought on them, and I’d seen the extents I’d go to to keep my own heart beating. I’d seen Trevenza Reach and the insides of baubles – which is more than a fraction of coves will ever be able to say. I’d seen all the worlds from the outside of the Congregation and got some sense of this little glimmery puddle of life we called the Thirteenth Occupation. I’d seen what the Ghosties left us and held catchcloth and lookstone for myself. I’d nattered to aliens and robots, and found a hardness in myself that made me a little jumpy at the thought of what I’d become. I’d turned from my own home and left my own father to die, and although it made me choke to think of those things – and what I’d done in Neural Alley, in the Limb Broker’s – I couldn’t say I regretted the steps that had brought me to this moment. Not the place they’d carried me to, either, and not the person they’d made me into.

Bosa Sennen never set out to turn me into something I wasn’t, but she did, and if I ever felt like sparing her a spit of gratitude it would be for that.

Adrana didn’t recognise me at first, in the bone room’s low red light. It wasn’t the armour. I’d shrugged it off by then and just taking it off me felt like relieving myself of a dark cloak of guilt and bad intentions. No, it was what I looked like without the armour that had her befuddled. She jerked back a little, and I couldn’t blame her for that. It wasn’t just the glowy, or the tin hand, or the hard set of my face, which was starting to look stern and angry even when I didn’t mean it. It was the fury in my eyes, a little glint of madness in both of them, and the fact that I didn’t mind in the least.