“Her parents?” Deng asked. Cardenia nodded. “You mean regarding funeral expenses.”

“I mean for anything, ever again. Their daughter’s dead. She was my friend. If I can’t do anything else right now, at least I can do this. Yes?”

“You are the emperox,” Deng said. “This is something you may do.”

“Then do it, please.”

“Yes, ma’am.” Deng stood. “Will there be anything else?”

Cardenia shook her head. Deng bowed, collected his materials, and moved to leave.

“Where will you be?” Cardenia asked. “In case I need you?”

Deng turned and smiled. “I am always nearby, ma’am. All you have to do is call.”

“Thank you, Gell.”

“Ma’am.” He left.

Cardenia waited until he was well out of the room before she had a good long cry, maybe the seventh or eighth she’d had since Naffa’s death.

Then she remembered where she last saw Naffa, and what Naffa had said to her. Not in real life, but in her dream.

Cardenia looked over to the door to the Memory Room, sat there for a couple of minutes thinking. Then got up and let herself into it.

Jiyi appeared the moment she entered. “Hello, Emperox Grayland II. How are you?”

“I am alone,” Cardenia said, and immediately hated the adolescent drama of the statement, but it was true, and there it was.

“You are always alone in the Memory Room,” Jiyi said. “And in another sense, you are never alone in it.”

“Did you think that up yourself?”

“I do not think,” Jiyi said. “It was programmed into me years ago.”

“Why?”

“Because eventually every emperox tells me they are alone.”

“Every emperox?”

“Yes.”

“That… weirdly makes me feel better.”

“That is a frequent reaction.”

“The Prophet is in here, yes? Rachela I.”

“Yes.”

“I would like to speak to her, please.”

Jiyi nodded and shimmered out, replaced by a woman. She was small and in this image nondescriptively middle-aged, which was different from the usual depictions of the Prophet, which showed her young and with flowing hair and striking cheekbones. The image did not look anything like this.

It also did not look anything like Naffa. Cardenia felt a momentary spasm of disappointment about this, then inwardly chastised herself for it. There was no reason she should have expected the Prophet to be Naffa outside of her dream.

“You are Rachela I,” Cardenia asked the image.

“I am.”

“The founder of the Interdependency, and the Interdependent Church.”

“Basically.”

“Basically?”

“It’s a little more complicated than that, in both cases. But we decided that having me be the founder of both would serve the mythology the best, so that’s what we said.”

“Were you an actual prophet?”

“Yes.”

“So you knew the things you were saying about the Interdependency and the principles of interdependency would come true.”

“No, of course not.”

“But you just said you were a prophet.”