Misery takes a cautious step forward. The ground remains solid beneath her feet, and the gravity as weak as ever. Lieutenant Frash disappeared during the procedure and remains nowhere to be found. “Where did they go?”

Ruin says: “Back to their usual assignment. You no longer need a chaperone, after all. Look around you.”

Suspended midair is an enormous red arrow, glorious and neon, pointing the way forward. In the clutter of everything new it has almost escaped attention, but now that it’s seized her attention it’s all she can look at. She isn’t sure what to make of it. It hurts her eyes.

“Instructions,” Ruin says. “You have a serving to report to. It’s telling you where to go.”

“And what happens if I ignore it?”

Zie shrugs. “Why don’t you find out?”

Ominous. But the delusion is only channeling Misery’s gut-brewed fear that she’s given up control of something she shouldn’t have. If the implant can tap into her visual cortex, make her see shit she’s not supposed to see, what else can it do? Deliver electric shocks for disobedience? Control if she feels pain or not? Take over how she eats and shits?

She’ll find out. Misery turns and marches in the direction opposite to the arrow’s big blinking finger.

Two strides later it appears fresh in her field of vision, reminding her she’s going the wrong way. She ignores it. Keeps walking. The arrow vanishes again, and re-ups itself in her vision. Every time it does so it comes back bigger and brighter, blinking shame. Going the wrong way, idiot. Misery keeps ignoring it, turning left and right with abandon, but it matches her in stubbornness. Barging in. Breaking the door down, sticking its face through like a deranged serial killer. Won’t let her be. She’s burrowing into the twists of Angelsteeth at a run now, tumbling through this alien place whose layout she does not know, and she’s getting progressively more lost. Still the arrow won’t leave her alone. Misery hits a dead end, the corridor’s terminus, a bulbous room comprising a scatter of sinkfoam couches around a central pit. Acrylplate exposes a wide swathe of the stars outside. A rest point?

“It’s an observation chamber,” Ruin says. Zie phases in and out of the acrylplate as though dancing with the cosmos. “Pilots come here to starbathe sometimes.”

“They don’t get lights in their rooms?”

“They do. But who could say no to this view?”

She can’t answer. Because plastered across that view is the red arrow of her disgrace, enormous and flashing, instructing her to turn around and go where she’s supposed to. Misery takes in its sprawl with resignation and despair. “I’m not getting rid of it, am I?”

“You’re in the military now,” Ruin said. “They can, in fact, tell you what to do. And they will.”