“Is that a challenge?” The delusion laughs. With a cold flash that only she perceives, Ruin appears next to her. She has no time to flinch or dodge before zie places a pale hand upon her neck. Misery’s nerves fizzle with mint-warmth at hir phantom touch. The buzz spreads through her extremities and turns her chest woolly. The fuck is happening—

“Relax,” Ruin says.

Saint Agneta’s pattern makes her edges fuzzy, as if she’s unspooling, skin coming unstuck, flesh slackening in loose ribbons. She’s dissolving in her clothes and the only solid thing is the amulet against her chest, a warm knot of stone. For a dizzying moment she looks down and realizes she has more limbs than she remembered, of course, she’d always had them in potentia, she just had to feel them differently.

The screen waits for her response with infinite patience as Misery gets trip-high on feeling, eager to flex her newfound topography. Upper left arm, lower left, upper right arm, lower right, each of her four feet tap dancing in sequence. A soaring burst of joy at the sudden unlocked possibilities. She wants to be let loose into the universe, to spin and leap between the stars, to—

“What’s going on here?”

The shadow of Major Reyes looms over her station. Shit. She’s ignored so many cues that the system tutted at her stack of errors and flagged her to command. Misery looks as calm as she can. “It’s nothing,” she says. “I just figured something out.”

The major’s displeasure only deepens. Leaning xer full weight on her station, xe flicks a jade finger at the screen. “Don’t talk. Show.”

Eyes shut, Misery takes another saint’s breath. The newfound sensation is still there. She still has it. She knows where all her secret limbs are. If the major wants a show, xe’ll get one.

The screen wants her to move her upper left arm. She does. Then her front right foot. Too easy. Lower left arm, lower right arm, back right foot, upper left arm, front right foot, back left foot, back right foot again. Just like pressing colored buttons. Nothing to it. The more actions she performs the easier it gets, she’s rolling along, skimming the tops of stars, she wants to go faster and the system obliges until the screen’s a green blur, and Misery’s eyes begin to ache—

Everything stops. The seraph model vanishes from the screen, replaced by a field of sunny yellow, textless and contextless. Misery blinks, stumbling over mental inertia. What just happened? Her heart races and the blood hurts in her veins. Has she crossed the line into madness?

Major Reyes huffs. “Well, maybe there is something to that prophecy after all.”

Misery pulls the helmet from her head. When did her temples get so feverish? “What does that mean?”