I stumbled to my feet so quickly that I knocked the chair over. For a heart-hammering, terrified second, I was convinced that my mother had spoken. Then I realised that the words had emerged from the Martyrium walls.

“Kill me,” the vision repeated.

The voice was toneless and echoing. I clenched my fist around the handle of the scalpel. Pale globes bulged from the ceiling above me, swelling out of the plaster like raindrops.

“Why is it so dark?” whispered the walls. “Why can’t I move?”

“Elfreda?”

I spun around. Reverend Celane stood in the entrance to the alcove, her head tilted slightly to the side in perplexed concern.

“Is something the matter?” she asked.

I felt like the ground had dropped away beneath my feet. Of all the Sisters in the Order, here stood the woman who scared me the most. Here she stood, blocking my only path of escape from the vision.

“Honoured Councilwoman.” I gestured reverence, trying to conceal the shaking of my hands. “You startled me.”

The globes swelled and dropped from the ceiling, landing on the floor with a wet sound. Eyeballs. Different sizes, but the irises were all the same colour, a brown so dark it could have been black. The long threads of optic nerves trailed behind them, and they pushed themselves along the stones like caterpillars.

“I thought I heard a noise. Is everything all right?” asked Celane.

“Oh, I just knocked over the chair.”

The Reverend stepped inside the alcove, and I flinched. She should not be here, she should not be inside my mother’s space. Excepting the Martyrium staff, only the martyr’s daughter was permitted to enter her alcove. Celane coming inside without so much as asking permission constituted a huge breach of propriety. Even through my haze of fear, I felt outraged.

“You were a speaker at the symposium,” she said, still advancing. “Which means you were at Geise’s Crown when the Haunts attacked. What an awful shock that must have been. It’s little wonder you’re on edge.”

“So long in the dark.” The irises contracted and expanded like mouths. “No one can hear me.”

I forced myself to breathe. In and out. No panic, not now, not in front of her.

“I’m fine.” My voice emerged rasping and faint. “I’m here to restore my lace, that’s all.”

“Yes, of course.” Celane nodded sympathetically. “I heard that Commander Asan ran everyone dry trying to keep the Haunts contained.”

“She did what was necessary.”

“Yes, I heard about that too. Shocking, truly shocking.”

The eyes crawled toward one another, tangling and sliding together into a bundle of white, red, and black. Celane’s compulse tightened around my thoughts like a silken noose.

“Elfreda, I have to know,” she said. “What really happened that night?”

Eater help me, I needed to get out of here. My head burned like I had a fever, and it was taking every ounce of self-control I possessed not to betray my panic. The Reverend watched me with those kind, intelligent brown eyes while the force of her lace strangled me.