More difficult: Misery gets through training somehow. She gets to mount a true seraph, gets to run her grubby hands all over its sacred flesh. Holy labradorite, a stone she’s never met. Will the sacred stone that incarnates the Faithful’s greatest weapons bow meekly to her will? She doesn’t think so. She might wind up destroying the seraphs. She might wind up destroying the station. In this scenario, she’s also dead. They’re all dead.

“I think you’re missing one crucial outcome,” Ruin says. The delusion has found hir favorite nesting spot on top of the wardrobe, a narrow block of gray polycarbonate that holds stacks of new uniforms fitted to Misery’s dimensions, plus a smattering of civvies in the dullest colors and cuts. The wardrobe is tall enough the delusion’s white crown brushes the vent-studded ceiling as zie squats upon it. “What if you, in fact, are meant to be a seraph pilot?”

For someone who claims to be a divine guide, Ruin does very little guiding. Almost as if zie weren’t a holy messenger but a mere bystander, an outgrowth of the shitshow that is Misery’s mind. She closes her eyes and layers her hands over her face, but she can still sense the delusion, a mocking shape in the corner of her consciousness, inescapable.

Fine. She should sleep. If she has to face her demons, she should take them face on. Shouldn’t she?

Misery dreams.

She’s back home on Rootsdown, with all that entails: homely pull of gravity, the glaze of tropic-heat and heavy air, the ennui and lethargy of life that rolls with the pace of a sun. The dark alleys between reefs, thick with smells of food and garbage water. The heavy walls of the churchhall, echoing with Crem’s voice. The white arches of the hospital whose paths she memorized during her many runs to pilfer salves to bake with. In Misery’s mind these dioramas are contained in the same place, a treacherous swamp of emotions she cannot distill into discrete thought and feeling. Rootsdown is all of these places at once.

Misery’s at the warehouse. Crem thinks she works at the factory, and she does have a job there inspecting machined parts packed with holy turquoise pulled from Rootsdown’s crust. But her main hustle is in the broken warehouse next door, a sloping gray building patchy with decay, its roof in a years-long process of caving in. The perfect place to bake tripsalves with the materials she’s stolen.

Misery becomes hyperaware of her hands and feet and how she can move them. The lucidity is welcome: at last, a modicum of control over her wild subconscious. The rotting warehouse calls to her. She has to go inside. It’s all right—if she makes the decision to enter the building, she’s still maintaining a form of control.