The major only makes a dismissive sound before walking off. Whatever. Misery lets anxiety and tension exit from her lungs. For a moment she’d like the voidsickness to take over. She’d flown through the vast chasms of the cosmos as the most powerful entity in the universe, unstoppable and answerable to no one. Now she understands how Mother felt in the deepest grips of her delusions, why she was so hard to reason with. A dangerous feeling. Toxic. Intoxicating.

So. She has to tip into voidmadness every time she interfaces with a seraph. No wonder mech pilots are rumored to have the highest incidences of late-stage voidsickness. It’s a job more dangerous than stonehunting, than beacon laying. She sees that now.

But look. She’s done it. She’s passed the test. She gets to live this lie for another day longer. That’s good, right? That’s good. It’s what she wants.

It’s what she wants.

Only a scatter of trainees have attained the yellow screen. Misery is one. Spider is another. Next to her the man leans back in his seat, flush with smugness. “Looks like someone’s having problems.”

In the seat farthest away from theirs, the Lady Alodia Lightning is not doing well. Her screen flares more red than green even as the other pilots in other servings find their multitude of feet. Spider snorts as he watches her struggle. “Not every saint can be a pilot,” he says. “She thinks she’s special because she’s highborn? She’s about to find out.”

Misery had expected joy, or a wine-sweet burst of schadenfreude at least. The princess failing where she, Misery, had succeeded! Something to hold over her arrogant, pretty head for the rest of time. Yet she cringes every time the Lady Alodia Lightning’s screen lights up red, over and over. How embarrassing. Misery can’t imagine recovering from such public humiliation.

“We can’t help her,” Ruin says. “If she is to come with you on this journey, she needs to prove herself.”

Of course. Convenient that Ruin can’t perform miracles on someone who exists independently of Misery’s skullmeat. It’s almost as if zie’s not real.

And yet a miracle happens, if one can call it that. Bit by bit the princess rallies. As Misery and Spider watch, the Lady Alodia Lightning figures out the separations over the course of several runs. Gets the hang of moving body parts she doesn’t have. The red screens come less frequently, then not at all. Eventually, the princess attains the yellow screen, the last of them to reach that heavenly state, but against all odds she does it. Saved from ultimate humiliation. “Well. The universe will never cease to surprise,” Spider drawls.