The real challenge around living with an implant, Misery decides, is stamina. The constant flood of information and visual distraction is fine in short bursts, but hours and hours later her mind has been stretched like spun glue and she is one loud noise away from a breakdown. The lights are endless. They are everywhere. On the way to dinner she trails her new serving in a haze of distraction, unable to ignore the technicolor veneer demanding her attention at all times. She’s reading the lozenges above everybody’s head, getting distracted by a newsblip about the siege of Monkglass, and falling so deeply into a half-yard stub about drama between two up-and-coming wave thespians that she misses that Ono Red-2 has vanished down the corridor. Damn. This is no time to be distracted. Things are dire and only getting worse.

“You’ll learn to ignore it all,” Ruin says. “You have no problems ignoring me, after all.”

Misery imagines the delusion falling off a cliff and into a series of enormous metal spikes. She really needs the endorphins.

Even a secret collection of dubious characters assembled for illegal and seditious purposes cannot escape the monotony of bureaucracy. Anything that has structure must be recorded, even if only in hidden files lurking in the depths of the General’s classified folders. Ono Red-2 were entered into the system. Briefed on a schedule. Taken to their quarters, tucked in the farthest corner of the personnel barracks. It seems to be a repurposed rec space: a too-large circular room with light-rimmed pits for simple food prep, reading, other kinds of R&R. Around it squats a series of private rooms turned into personnel quarters where beds have been awkwardly and hastily molded. Their shared bathroom has the vibe of a public toilet. Best they could do on short notice. Misery was given a move-in kit, and there’s a screen through which she can order anything else she needs and desires, plus the services of the replicator that lives in the common room.

And now: dinner. Evening meals on Angelsteeth are communal affairs. Four hundred soldiers of all ranks packed into an arch-roofed hall of the deepest holy jade. Deadmarble tables polka-dot the interior, fish-pink and gleaming, basking under clusters of flasklights too numerous to count. Here Misery finds respite in walls kept so blank it has to be deliberate. Even the ubiquitous lozenges tagged to each head seem calmer, less intrusive. There is prayer: a priest in familiar colors leading the flock in a rumbling voice that reminds her just a bit of Crem. She’ll never admit how much comfort she’s extracting from this touch of the familiar. A reminder that her life so far hasn’t taken place on another plane of reality altogether. That she, growing up on the dust-choked plains of Rootsdown, shares something in common with the arch-backed princess beside her.