Names crowded into his thoughts. Staski. Kiril. Kirigan. Anton. Eryk. An avalanche of memories. He’d been all of them, but who should he become now? He’d had plenty of time to consider such things in the isolation of his glass cell, but now that he was free, truly free to choose, he found that only one name suited. The oldest of them: Aleksander. He had no reason to hide his strangeness anymore. Saints were meant to live forever.

He passed into a muddy town square and saw a small church capped by a single whitewashed dome. Through the open door, he glimpsed the priest, tending to something by the altar, as a woman lit candles for the dead. It would do for sanctuary. They couldn’t very well turn a barefoot beggar away.

It wasn’t until Aleksander was inside, the cool shadows of the church thick and comforting around him, that he realized where he was. Above the altar hung a painting of a man with iron fetters at his wrists and a collar at his neck, his eyes looking up at nothing. Sankt Ilya in Chains.

He really did know this place. He had come back to the beginning: This church had been raised over the ruins of the home of Ilya Morozova, Aleksander’s grandfather, a man thrown to his death from the very bridge Aleksander had crossed on his way into town. He had been known as the Bonesmith, the greatest Fabrikator to ever live. And yet he had been much more than that.

“Hello?” the priest said, turning toward the doorway.

But Aleksander had already sunk into the shadows, gathering them like a shroud around his body in the darkness of the side aisle.

He moved quietly to the door that he knew would lead him down into the basement, down the rickety stairs to where old pews and rotted wall hangings had been stacked. His memories were as dark and dusty as this place, but the plan of the church and what had come before it was buried in his mind, and he knew there was yet another room beneath this one. He located a lantern and went looking for the hatch.

It didn’t take long. When he pulled on the metal ring, the hinge let loose a shriek. Maybe the priest would hear and try to pray away the ghosts.

Yuri rattled around in his skull at that little bit of sacrilege, but Aleksander ignored him.

I will show you wonders, he promised.

This is a holy place, Yuri protested.

Aleksander nearly laughed. What made a church holy? The gilded halos of the Saints? The words of its priest?

The prayers said beneath its roof.

He scowled in the darkness. The boy’s piousness was exhausting.

Aleksander lowered himself into the room beneath the basement. Here, the floor was dirt and the lantern showed nothing but earthen walls, roots trying to push their way through.