‘Every day hurts,’ Chetta replied, gritting her teeth. ‘Let’s get this over with.’

It did hurt: the witch was neither skilled nor experienced at helping a battered Navigator in chronic pain to her feet. However, it hurt less than it would have done had Chetta tried to get up on her own. She clung to that fact, even while her head was spinning and she was fighting the urge to throw up into her respirator.

‘Right,’ she gasped, when she could speak again, with the witch supporting her on one side. ‘Now, we’re going to need to get inside the ritual.’

‘I… We… I can’t walk into that,’ the witch said in a small voice. ‘I can’t.’

‘What’s your name?’ Chetta asked.

‘What?’

‘Your name,’ Chetta repeated. She felt like she was wasting valuable seconds, but this would all be for nothing if she couldn’t get the witch to do as she wanted.

‘Evelyn.’

‘Evelyn, I need you to trust me,’ Chetta told her seriously. ‘I’m a Navigator. I guide starships through the warp – that is literally what my kin and I were created for. For anyone else, trying to walk into that ritual would be suicide, but I can find us a way through. I know that the only chance we have to stop it is from the centre, I can see that.’

‘What if you’re wrong?’ Evelyn asked.

Chetta kissed her teeth in frustration. ‘Then we die a few minutes before everyone else does. Unless you have a shuttle parked within half a mile, and you’re a fast runner, you’re dead anyway. What have you got to lose?’

‘My soul is damned anyway,’ Evelyn said darkly.

‘Most of us are, if you listen to the preachers,’ Chetta retorted. ‘That just makes me want to live as long as possible to avoid what comes afterwards. Are you with me?’

Evelyn screwed up her eyes for a second, then nodded decisively. ‘All right. I’m with you.’

Relief washed through Chetta, although her chest tightened up again a moment later when she considered what she was about to attempt. ‘Good. Let’s get–’

‘Step away from her!’

The voice was ragged and pain-wracked, but recognisable. Chetta twisted her head around with a pop of protesting joints, and saw a figure staggering out of the smog. It was covered in blood, and one of its arms hung at an unnatural angle, but the other still clutched a hellgun that was aimed, somewhat haphazardly, at the pair of them.

‘DeShe– Alyssana!’ Chetta snapped, correcting herself. Her former aide had the woozy look of someone who’d taken a far harder blow to the head than it was healthy for a human to receive, and her left arm was clearly broken: both probably suffered when she’d been struck by the flying, bleeding missile that had been Carmine’s dismembered body. ‘Alyssana, lower your weapon!’

‘She’s a witch,’ Nero said, her voice groggy but determined. Her comm-bead was still active, since her words reached Chetta’s ears muffled by her respirator, but also with the faint crackle of interference.