The calibration room suffers from excessive light and chilled air. Within its circular confines sit two dozen plastic ovals, cut away to make space for a pilot. A name-bearing tab floats over each one. Misery finds her station, sits, and puts on the interfacing helmet: a velvet-lined silver dome with the smell of a well-used public object cleaned an uncountable number of times. An aura on the uncomfortable border between natural and chemical.

A blue screen appears before Misery. On it is the anatomical map of a seraph, each of its eight limbs highlighted a different neon. Four arms. Four feet springing from bifurcated twig legs. Major Reyes stalks the room as the trainees settle in. “The purpose of calibration,” xe says, “is to acclimatize your bipedal, two-armed brain to the task of controlling something as complex as a seraph. Until you can reliably produce discrete responses to each of their limbs, you won’t be allowed to progress to the next stage.”

Well. How hard can it be?

Ten minutes later Misery has her answer. It’s an impossible fucking ask. The blue screen lights up over and over: move the left upper arm, move the right lower arm and so on. Each time, Misery transmits her will through the interfacing helmet, only to be told she failed. Twenty years as a bipedal creature has fixed her mind’s workings: you have two arms, and two legs. One on each side. That’s it. Over and over the system berates her as she fails to return discrete cranial patterns for the lower arms and back legs. How the fuck is she supposed to invent control of limbs she doesn’t have? She fumes as the screen blatts red for what feels like the hundredth time. If they’d put her straight into a seraph she would have some fancy tricks to show off. She and the holy labradorite would hash out an agreement. Instead she has to struggle with this electronic doodad, prying into the pulses of her mind.

She looks at Spider in the next station over and of course his screen is green after green after green. He looks bored, tapping his foot in frustration drawn from an entirely different well. Fucking good for him. Around them the other screens are starting to blink green. Misery’s about to be exposed.

“Don’t think with your mind,” Ruin says. The delusion swans through the room as though zie owns it. “Your thoughts hold you back.”

Her fucking biology is holding her back, that’s what it is. The delusion can talk all the shit zie wants, but it will change nothing.